TBPN Live - Timeline in Turmoil: Elon Clashes with Altman, Perplexity Offers $34.5B for Chrome, Apple in Elon's Crosshairs | David Risher, James Cadwallader, Devin Bhushan, Demi Guo, Eugenia Kuyda, Alex Danco, Isaiah Taylor

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TVPN. Today's Tuesday, August 12, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Jordy, what is going on in the timeline? We got a red flag. We got a red flag on the play.

Starting point is 00:00:13 The timeline is in turmoil. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fighting. Mom and dad are fighting. Mom and dad are fighting. Shots fired. This all started because of Apple, actually. Not Open AI, not X. Not the Everything app.

Starting point is 00:00:28 But Apple. and the iOS charts. So this started with Elon Musk posting. Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach number one in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. XAI will take immediate legal action.

Starting point is 00:00:50 Well, the community notes section took immediate action and added a non-requent action. and added a number of extra context that they thought people might want to know. First, in January of 2025, DeepSeek reached number one overall in the App Store, similar to how Ramp is our number one sponsor on this show. Time is money, save both. These are yours corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all-in-one place, folks. Go to Ramp.com.

Starting point is 00:01:18 And just one month ago, on July 18, 2025, perplexity reached number one overall in India's app store. That's interesting. I didn't realize that. GROC has hit number one in Japan. Oh, that's right. Probably a number of factors contributing to that. So most of the AI apps live in the productivity section.

Starting point is 00:01:38 So that must have been in that, but it's odd because it's like we need a whole new set of categories for the new AI apps. I feel like they should have their own category immediately. What are all the categories? I mean, productivity, I feel like that's everything from like spreadsheets to chat GPT. like it's a pretty broad it's a pretty broad category um and and so they i mean apple probably needs to redo the uh the the categories where are you are the categories i feel like you can't i feel like they're hard to find these days they have editor choice apps which we'll get into because uh okay so browse categories they have apple vision pro apps at the top that's an odd choice for the

Starting point is 00:02:17 iPhone version of the app store then apple watch apps then ar apps then books business developer tools, education, entertainment, finance, food and drink. Food and drink gets its own Well, I'm looking at the global top charts right now are global for the U.S., so across all the different categories. And right now, chat GPT is number one. Number two is tea on her dating advice, which is a new tea app, which is helping men date safe. Wait, wait, so it's the men version? The male version of the T app. It is very poorly rated, but it's number one in lifestyle. And number two on the overall charge. Number three is T-dating.

Starting point is 00:02:57 Four is threads, which apparently just crossed 400 million monthly active users. Adam Messeri's not messing around over at MetaHQ. And GROC is number five. Okay, that's not that bad. This is despite Apple, I do believe that Elon is correct and that Apple's not including GROC in features,

Starting point is 00:03:17 which are editorial decisions. Editorial. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, Doge designer says GROC the number two app and productivity, number six overall. So why is it so hard to find? And what he's pointing out is that Elon Musk showed this. Grock is the smartest AI in the world and on the toughest test and came first by far encoding, but is not mentioned at all under AI by Apple. So Apple did an editorial view on the AI powered apps and they listed out a bunch. Chatchipt,

Starting point is 00:03:45 Google Gemini, Microsoft co-pilot, Lightroom, photo and video editor, which I mean I use it every once in a while, but it barely has AI features. It does not compare to a foundation model. It's not a chat interface. Then you have Canva. Then you have Duolingo, which of course, Duolingo uses artificial intelligence in some ways, but you don't think of it as like a competitor to chat GPT.

Starting point is 00:04:09 So this is clearly just like, here's some fun apps. And we're using the AI buzzword over at Apple. And I think it's given the series of PR crises that GROC has experienced in the last call it six weeks, I think it is fairly fair for the app store to say, hey, let's let this breathe a little bit. We're not, we're not removing them from the app store. We're not removing them from the rankings. They're still ranked. Yep. But maybe let's not feature it given that it's been saying. Yeah, the other, the other interesting thing is like GROC usage has to be split across

Starting point is 00:04:46 X and GROC, the actual app. Like I bet I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of actual prompts or tokens flow through X, the everything app. Like that's certainly how I use GROC when I use it. I usually start with the post, click the GROC button, then I'm going back and forth a little bit there. And then also they actually have a pretty awesome flow where now on any image you see on X, you can press and hold and say, edit this in GROC,

Starting point is 00:05:17 and then you can just type Studio Ghibli and it just Ghibli's it right there in GROC. they launched a feature to make turn it into a video video exactly so all of those groc tokens all those groc usages that's going to feed into the x app which again they they've always put x in news and not in social networking because i think it couldn't beat facebook and instagram but it can beat like the like the traditional news apps so all of the different rankings are all very they're it's all game to different ways some of them are momentum based some of them are different categories and I mean we heard this from Nikita beer where he was saying that

Starting point is 00:05:56 his last app that went super viral he hid in the games section as to his those were his words he hid because the game section is so crowded that people wouldn't see him climbing the rankings but so charts are based on acceleration broadly and total usage and there are only like 10 dominant social platforms so if he had a ton of momentum he'd probably be in the top 10 people would be screenshoting and being like, what is this? And it would be on Mark Zuckerberg's desk. And Mark would have to be like, what's our plan to kill this? You know, right? As opposed to if you're hanging out in games next to 75 Candy Crush clones, you're going, you could be doing well, but realistically, you're not, you're not really gaining that much, you're not drawing that much

Starting point is 00:06:42 attention. Then at the last second, he swaps over to social networking where he actually wanted to be, and then he's at the top of the shirts. Anyway, so Elon says Apple's behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides Open AI to reach number one in the App Store. He starts getting community noted. Sam Altman fires back says this is a remarkable claim. Claims that Elon is using X to benefit himself in his own companies and harm his competitors. Sam starts getting community noted. Elon fires back and says, you've got 3 million views on your BS post.

Starting point is 00:07:13 You liar far more than I've received on many of mine, despite me having 50 times your follower account. Elon's getting community noted, but Sam fires back skill issue or boss. School issue, robots. Anyways, based off of that, Sam says, will you sign an affidavit that you never directed changes to the X algorithm in a way that hurt your competitors or helped your own companies? Wait, who said that?

Starting point is 00:07:33 This is Sam. Sam said that. An affidavit. I will apologize if so. One thing is that Open AI has consistently dominated the narrative on X, organically. Many of their... To some degree, I feel like Open AI has been more dominant just in the real world.

Starting point is 00:07:52 world and actually Anthropics done very well on X. And there's been this whole theme of like Claude has better vibes and big model smell and oh, I would just say if Sam Altman puts a post up, he can put up a picture of a Death Star and get 20 million views, right? Yeah. And so I don't believe that he's like shadow banned. I don't believe that anyone in Open AI is like shadow ban or being held back in the algorithm. Yeah. But somebody responded to this. Really quickly. If Sam's worried about Reach, he should be using Restream, putting his content all over the internet, re-stream one live-design 30-plus destinations,

Starting point is 00:08:30 multi-stream and reach your audience, wherever they are. And thank you to everyone in the chat today. Mark, Saraj, we got Taylor, David. We got a whole crew here. Techno-Chief, I believe, said good morning to me. Hello, Techno-Chief. Good to see you. And it's fun having all the crew assemble in the chat rooms.

Starting point is 00:08:48 We actually can see the chat wherever it's happening, whether it's on X or on. on YouTube because of Restream. So thank you to Restream. Anyway, continue. A friend just message and said, somebody tell Elon to unshadow ban me. Okay.

Starting point is 00:09:00 And I think that- Oh, I think I know who this is. I think it's much more likely that it's a skill issue. I think it is a skill issue for this particular person. Sam is saying here, you never know, you never know. But somebody responded to Sam and Elon's exchange and they said, Grock, who's right, don't be biased. And Grock fires back and says, based on verified

Starting point is 00:09:22 evidence, Sam Altman is right. Musk's Apple antitrust claim is undermined by apps like deep seek and perplexity, reaching number one in 2025. Conversely, Musk has a history of directing X algorithm changes to boost his post and favor his interests per 2023 reports and ongoing probes. Hypocrisy noted. So we'll see how long. Yeah, but this is 4D chess because in general people don't believe GROC because they believe

Starting point is 00:09:47 it to be insane. Well, it said some wild thing. It said some crazy things. And so if Grock is siding with Sam, people will be like, well, Grock's wrong. Elon's actually correct. Yeah. That's the beauty of these things. Elon is thinking, what have I created a monster?

Starting point is 00:10:01 This is like the child that, what's the, what's, what's, what's, what's that, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, what's, well, we'll see how long, Brock. I don't know how much you want to play on that analogy. It gets pretty weird. It gets pretty weird. I mean, Natipus marries his mother. Yes. But we'll see how long Grock lasts in the timeline today. We'll see.

Starting point is 00:10:32 We'll see. We'll see. So, yeah, the Wall Street Journal wrote it up. Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides opening eye to reach number one. The App Store, which features lists of top and trending apps is a key way for apps to access new customers. Apple doesn't say much about how or why it chooses, particular apps to feature among the factors it considers

Starting point is 00:10:53 usability and positive reviews and ratings. Yeah, it's definitely getting more and more complex. It's just important to break out editorial decisions from the App Store team and true rankings. I mean, I really, I think a lot of people have not taken a tour of the modern App Store on iOS because it used to be that you just show up and there was just a list of, like the charts were like a few clicks away. I'm like seven clicks deep. There's an ad for just Google, I guess, in here. There's

Starting point is 00:11:27 essentials that are just top games right now. Like you have to scroll and scroll and scroll and then you go over to apps. Then you can browse the categories. But even when you browse the categories, you go to productivity, it's going to give you like the, when I go to productivity, you think I'd be browsing to hit like, okay, show me the top productivity apps. No. It's, it's showing me an app called Sofa, a downtime organizer, then it's showing me essential productivity apps that are selected by the App Store editors, then the best calendar apps, best to-do apps, best email apps, best focus time, or habit tracking. It's going, going, going. Well, the big question is how much discovery is actually happening in the app store?

Starting point is 00:12:06 Is this where people are actually finding? Finally, I got to the top charts. But it's seven clicks deep. And so, yeah, if I go to free apps, it's chat GPT number one, then Groch number two, then Microsoft Authenticator, number three, AGIHC. If you're Microsoft Authenticator, maybe doesn't get enough love. No, but the question here is, are people discovering various LMs through TikTok and X and Instagram and various platforms? Is that where discovery is happening? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:34 And I'm sure there's some discovery happening in the App Store, but it has to be a very small fraction of the downloads being driven are actually driven by the editorial decisions from the app store. Of course, of course. Yeah, and games don't even show up in the top, like it's not, games are not, it's a completely separate tab. You cannot select games as one of the subcategories of apps because games are not considered apps anymore in the app store to answer the question about like hiding in games. Yeah, the other, the other question is just like how much, how fair is it to give yourself a little boost in your app that you paid $70 billion for? Yeah. like I was thinking about this and I was saying like 44 billion well he was 44 yeah yeah it was 64 it wasn't 69 I thought it was 69 for some reason that was that was the price per share

Starting point is 00:13:24 was he paid so ridiculous anyway um I was thinking about like before the launch of Instagram stories I didn't have a way to share Snapchat stories on Instagram like you could screenshot them but There's no sort of like native way to share a link to a story that if someone on my Instagram feed sees it, it clicks and it automatically opens in Snapchat. Like it was always a walled garden. And then when Instagram stories came out, there was really no way to tie those two platforms together.

Starting point is 00:14:00 Like in the pre meta era, there was a way when you shared a post on Instagram, to check a box and automatically share it to your Twitter. And it would not just share a link. It would share the actual photo with the comment. And it would work as a native post on X. And it could, you know, not really go viral, but it could, it existed on Twitter as like a first class citizen

Starting point is 00:14:30 in the sense that the image was there. There was no link. It was just like you had just actually opened the app, posted the same photo with proper crosspost, right? And then eventually once Facebook bought Instagram, Twitter had to respond by breaking that integration. So early on Twitter had this very, this was like the Adam Bain era, like the early, back the Dick Costolo era. Twitter had this idea of like, we're going to be the command line for your life. And there was this idea of like, I'm going to be able to tweet at you to send money to you.

Starting point is 00:15:04 like the everything app idea is something that's over 13 years old at this point, maybe 15 years old at this point, like the Twitter executives were thinking about this a long time ago, like being able to tweet money at you, being able to like use Twitter as kind of this like substrate or this like API for all sorts of things. Other apps would be built on top of Twitter. There was tweet deck and tweet bird and like all these different.

Starting point is 00:15:27 Like the mobile app was by an independent developer. And they just didn't. And they were like, why would we need one? We just developed the protocol. Reddit did this too. Yeah, well, you need one because you want to stuff ads in it, obviously, and you want to monetize it. It makes a ton of sense.

Starting point is 00:15:40 And so Elon came and killed all that. But, yeah. The other challenge here is GROC has a variety of NSFW features. Yep. And when Apple is making editorial decisions about which apps to feature in the app store, that is certainly going to be on their mind. We're having Eugenia from Replica on the show later today. I'm wondering if Replica, I think, is currently in the App Store

Starting point is 00:16:09 with 226,000 reviews, hasn't gotten kicked out. I'm trying to think if any other apps. So only fans, for example, does not have an app. I'm wondering if any of the, what character AI does, right? So Apple's clearly drawn the line at like, like, AI chatbot even if they're somewhat erotic are okay. But that doesn't mean they're going to feature them. They're not going to promote it.

Starting point is 00:16:43 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's absolutely correct. So. And then again, I think it's very hard to say how Apple makes these editorial decisions. Yep. But it's very possible that they are talking with people on the Apple team,

Starting point is 00:17:00 being like, what apps do you like? What apps are you using? Making decisions that way, right? I think part of GROC over the last month or so is like figuring out, like, how do we get strong consumer adoption? Which categories are we going to get strong? I'll tell you how they get strong consumer adoption. SOC2 compliance. They need to get on Vanta.

Starting point is 00:17:20 Automate compliance, manage, risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. No, that is a good question. And how can Grok actually get consumer adoption? The companion space seems like maybe the right move, even if it is a little weird. But is there any other path? I mean, forking it into X and Twitter and, like, having it show up on every post seems like a reasonable way.

Starting point is 00:17:49 I wonder, it is weird that they have two apps. I thought X was supposed to be the everything app. Like, why are they trying to get me to install a second app when they should maybe just say, hey, we're actually going to be the everything app? you can use GROC fully and you're all the upgrade and you can get on GROC heavy and you can be paying $200 a month

Starting point is 00:18:09 for a top tier super insane level LLM but it all exists and it's all managed within the X-App that already has a lot of installation. Yeah, it's a challenge. Your GROC is is top or near the top

Starting point is 00:18:26 of a bunch of different benchmarks and yet that doesn't guarantee consumer adoption. Right? People don't switch products because something is 20% better in this technical way, right? They develop habits. Yeah. And the other thing, it was only a month ago, GROC or XAI announced a partnership with the Department of Defense, $200 million contract.

Starting point is 00:18:47 So that's serious. But again, you know, figuring out where they're going to ramp revenue with consumers that when it's not just bundled into X, the social media app. Yeah. I think it's interesting to debate, like, when can a new technology be bolted on and become additive to an existing platform versus you need a new app to actually get it to work? So Facebook actually rolled out a search engine in Facebook, the blue app, like years ago. And when you would go to search, you could search for your friends, but then you could also go and it was, would search the web too and it would say hey you're searching for this thing there's no posts about it out there so let's just pull from the web and they basically built a search engine team

Starting point is 00:19:38 pull up this post from chat gpti i want to see john's live reaction to it okay let me let me see this post um whereas whereas like like stories was something that was added so they chat gpt quoted grok saying that sam olbin is right and said good bot good buy Wow. Timelines and turmoil. You love to see it. It's a great day on the internet. But there's always, yeah, so I think there is something about like the pixel screen, the screen pixel real estate that is, that is somewhat, like, screen pixels are, are, like, scarce. And you can only do so much. Like, it's, it's, like, Instagram was able to add reels as a tab, integrate those in the main feed. they were able to add stories up at the top as a little bar and it got crowded but no but Instagram did not do not see massive churn yeah but I think that if they I'm I really think if

Starting point is 00:20:38 they try and stuff like okay yes this is also like Claude code and you're going to like do your you're going to do your homework in Instagram now you're going to do your your your software engineering in in Instagram right now you're going to have a chat below I think people will just say no I think it's I think it's too too big of a step whereas going from photos to videos to reels to stories like all of that works within the same kind of ux ui space but if you try and bolt on like a productivity tool into a social network it winds up being a little rough and so maybe that's the reason why Elon realizes that like grok has to be a separate app because if i'm using grok heavy to solve Olympic level math

Starting point is 00:21:24 I might not want that to happen on the chaos timeline feed, right? Yeah, I mean, if, but it's not a pill battle. If you're software engineer working at a company, and every time you, your boss walks up to talk to you about something, you're in X the everything app, just scroll on the timeline while coding, that might be tough, right? It might be better to be doing that coding work and, you know, with GROC, right? Put a spreadsheet in there.

Starting point is 00:21:52 Put a database in there. Let me build an entire business within the Everything app. Tyler, what's your reaction today? I think so one thing I haven't think about is like, I forget who it was, but someone said like, as a company, you want to like do things that your competitor that like go against your competitor's morals, right? Do you remember? Yeah, this was Paul Graham. Yeah, okay. It wasn't morals, but it was just like the idea of counter positioning, this idea that like Avi Schiffman, a friend, like he's making a product.

Starting point is 00:22:23 that is a wearable AI device. And if he makes it look like an Apple product and he makes it like, oh, it's instead of an AirPod and an iPhone, it's a necklace and it has Apple design language, Apple will totally be able to just steamroll that by launching something very similar. Whereas if he comes out with something

Starting point is 00:22:42 that has such a bizarre design that Apple would be like, wow, if we try and copy him. And he's not trying to make it useful for anything other than being your friend. Yep. Right. He's also counter positioning against ChatGPT, which is a tool. It's not, its default state is not to be your friend. People use it that way.

Starting point is 00:23:02 And in some ways, it's designed to function like that. But ultimately, yeah, I think he's found, he's carved out his own. And Grok did the same thing by coming out and like leaning really heavy into companionship. Yeah. That is a, I think that's a thing that was a way down that path. If they're gonna go like in that like kind of kind of positioning like idea, I think they could also, I could see them doing almost like a Cluley type thing where it's like, okay, you can use this for your homework. Like you make it very good. And like you don't have to use like cheating per se. But I think that's like an interesting way that like if they want to go further down that like consumer kind of positioning. Yeah, it's just, it's odd that it feels like they're trying to do a lot right now. They're still in the exploration phase because I have, I mean, maybe this gets to like the value of transfer learning in reinforcement learning, but I have it, I have a hard time believing that many people who are in the market for like a companion are like, I definitely want it to be able to ace humanity's last exam.

Starting point is 00:24:04 Like I, in fact, in fact, in fact, I think that you might want a companion not to be better than you at math. I think you might want a companion that just kind of like is like, oh yeah, I agree, man. Like that math problem is a toxic friendship dynamic. People are like, I want I want my friend to be great, but not better than me. Exactly. That's real. So they need to, they need to dumb it down. They need to be the inverse of bench hacking.

Starting point is 00:24:28 Yeah, the truth-seeking. Yeah, the new meta is going to be teaching your AI how to do things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Teaching it history. Yeah. Teaching it how to do your homework. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the Feynman method, you teach and then you learn, you learn, like,

Starting point is 00:24:41 I would probably learn more from teaching an LLM the answer to a problem than it trying to teach me. What were you about to say? I was going to say, like, the truth-seeking idea of GROC seems very much, like, opposed to the companion aspect. Like, those seem like two different ends of... The hero of our group chat right now is one of the greatest fabulous in history. He's a serial liar. But he's the most entertaining character. He's the court jester of our group chat because he hallucinates more than GPT2.

Starting point is 00:25:15 And it's fantastic. And it genuinely provides a lot of value than just someone who's like, oh, I will only give you things that are 100%. I will only say things that are 100% factual. I will only say things that are definitively provable. It's like, no, he throws out a lot of wild pitches. But every once in a while, you just slam it into the outfield. Anyway. Well, let's switch gears.

Starting point is 00:25:39 Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at figma.com. Try Figma Make. Yeah. Should we go over to Perplexity World? Yes. So, exclusive from the Wall Street Journal, AI startup Perplexity, made an unsolicited

Starting point is 00:25:59 long-shot offer to buy Google's Chrome browser for $34.5 billion. This inspired me, John. Everybody needs to be making long-shot offers. BPM, let's submit an offer to buy the Golden Gate Bridge, privatize it. That's a good one. That's a good one. We've got to be thinking bigger. What else should we buy?

Starting point is 00:26:18 I don't know. It's tough. Yeah, it's really, when I saw this, it's funny to think that Sundar has to go to the board. We're like, probably send them an email and say, like, I'm required to let you know that we've received this offer from perplexity to buy one of the Crown Jewels. one of the crown jewels of our product ecosystem. I wonder how real this is. Like it seems like the reporting is pretty loose.

Starting point is 00:26:51 We can read through this Wall Street Journal article and then kind of like dig into it a little bit more. So perplexities offer significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated 18 billion. Has this ever been done before? Has any tech company been able to pull off an acquisition that's bigger than their own valuation? Like, you need to raise so much money.

Starting point is 00:27:11 What was the slow ventures company that Metropolis, then they buy a company that was much larger, you know, basically more traditional. Kind of reverse merger almost. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. So there's also pressure. So estimates of Chrome's enterprise value vary widely,

Starting point is 00:27:28 but recent ones have ranged between 20 billion and 50 billion. I have no idea how you got that. I feel like Chrome is probably more valuable than that, just on, I mean, I imagine that the default search engine in Chrome has got to be as valuable as the default search engine in iOS, Safari, right? And how much is Apple paying Google every year? 20. 20 billion? Per year. I mean, you'd pay, like, you'd pay way more than 50 billion dollars to get 20 billion dollars a profit every year. It's crazy. So that feels low. I don't know

Starting point is 00:28:03 where, I don't know where there's estimates came from, but they are apparently under pressure. US district judge omit meta is weighing whether to force Google to sell the browser as a means of weakening Google's stranglehold on web search. It's so, it's so interesting that, like, we're having this debate now. Like, Google's had 99% of the web search market for two decades, and they finally have a crack in the, in the, in the, in the foundation with chat GPT, actually, eroding things, AI, LLM's kind of upending web search dominance. Like, yeah, we're having, we're having James from profound on later today, which is built a big business very quickly because consumers are now using something besides Google search

Starting point is 00:28:48 to, to do web searches. Yeah, this is like the last, this is, this is like completely the wrong time to be focused on this, like the ship has completely sailed, but that's kind of the, it's kind of the pace that the government operates at. Yeah, the journal says perplexity offer could be an attempt to signal to the judge that there's an interested buyer should he force a sale. I think there would be a lot of interested buyers if there was a forced sale. Yeah. Who else would buy it? Apple? Meta? Microsoft? Get Bing going again? Bang. It's Bing. Bing? I mean, Microsoft would have a wild

Starting point is 00:29:24 strategy because they'd have all the code to chat GPT, all the open AI intellectual property. They could do what perplexity is thinking about, right? yeah I mean what does this say what does this say about I mean so they just launched the perplexity comet browser Daniel says crumbs worth at least 90 to 120 Billy I agree I think 20 is 20 is too low but yeah so they so perplexity just launched comet we had Arvind on the show he said this is a big important bet for the company yep if you're if you just launched a browser and now you're saying that you want to buy to compete with Chrome and now you're trying to buy Chrome.

Starting point is 00:30:09 What does that say about the state of your new product? Distribution is king. It's very clear that even if you built a better product, the best product is not going to win. And we see this with the LLMs. Like the leaderboards and the vibes shift constantly, but the consumer adoption is just around chat. Everyone just uses chat.

Starting point is 00:30:33 That's the one that's broken through. That's the one that people are familiar with all over the United States and all over the world. And so it's very hard to break through. Even if perplexity can like rocket to the top of the app store in India for a little bit, like it's hard to hold on to when the chat GPT snowball is just growing bigger and bigger every single day. Yeah. Much like the graphite snowball. Code review for the age of AI.

Starting point is 00:30:57 Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. graphite. Deb. Is there a polymarket on perplexity, by the way? Can you look that up? I will read this. Will Perplexity acquire Chrome in 2025? What's the market on it?

Starting point is 00:31:13 When I posted about it earlier, it was at 12%. And I said, 12 seems quite high. And it's now at 3%. It went down, even though they're in the journal saying they're going to do it. They're like issuing offers. The market opened at 34%. Okay, like 9 a.m. when the news dropped, and it's now down at 3%. Wait, just today. It went from 34 down to 3. Wow. So this has basically been like debunked. Yeah. Makes sense.

Starting point is 00:31:40 Yeah, I mean, there's, I would put the odds of this deal happening closer to 0% than 1%. That sounds fair. But great way for perplexity to get in the journal. Call me. No, this is great for SEO. It definitely puts perplexity and web browser in the same keyword. Perplexity was also bidding on TikTok earlier this year. Arvin loves a long shot bet, a long shot bid. I invited him on the show this morning.

Starting point is 00:32:17 He, I don't think they want to. He's not ready for press. Not ready to chat, but we love a size Lord long shot offer. Keep throwing these out. More star should do this. Google hasn't indicated a willingness to sell Chrome in testimony this year. Pichai told the judge that forcing the company to sell it or share data with rivals would harm Google's business, deter it from investing in new technology, and potentially create security risks. Chrome has roughly 3.5 billion users worldwide. It's like, it's like perplexity has probably like millions of users, but it's just going to take decades, even at reasonable growth rate to hit 3 billion. It's just so many people.

Starting point is 00:32:57 And it counts for more than 60% of the global browser market. lower than I thought it would be. Found in 2022, San Francisco-based perplexity recently released its own web browser called Comet to some of its users. Tyler, you've demoed these. Yeah. What are you daily driving these days in terms of the web browser? I'm using old reliable Chrome. You're using Chrome. Yeah, I don't know. None of the agent browsers really seemed very helpful to me. Have you churned from Cluelly to? Yeah. Well, I started using that, like, you know, right after the show ended. Yeah, I mean, I'm not doing interviews.

Starting point is 00:33:32 I was thinking about like the Cluey pattern. What if Tyler was like, been using Cluelly every day, hours a day, we're like, wait, you've been interviewing with other companies? Well, that's the thing is that I, when I was thinking about Cluelly, I was actually wondering like if we ran the show through Cluelly and we had like just this idea of like streaming audio essentially and streaming pixels and then just somewhat random LLM queries firing all the time. Like is that a good pattern versus chat GPT where you have to decide, okay, this is the time to query it?

Starting point is 00:34:11 And so when I think about like the going to you and saying like the pull the polymarket up on perplexity or tell me the market share for Chrome, like if we could have something like clearly running and it's just a big screen there that I can see. just pulling up answers to questions that it thinks we're about to talk about or ask or just adding context. That actually might be kind of useful to us. But I don't know if a tool like that exists. It also just might be so sloppy and so noisy and so inference heavy that it just doesn't math out. I don't know. Are there any value? What's actually seeing breakout for you in terms of AI adoption? I mean, most of my time using AI tools is just like coding stuff.

Starting point is 00:34:54 Yeah. So it's like Claude Curs a little bit. Sometimes I just go raw, chatGBT.com. Oh, that's raw? Yeah, yeah, just straight prompt, like, no. Raw text file. What happened to, what happened to good old-fashioned? Just handwritten code, farm the table code. Apparently not.

Starting point is 00:35:12 Pastor Ray's code. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, clearly, I'm not like doing, I'm not doing like sales calls or like anything that really requires that kind of like interaction. Yeah, yeah. So not to be useful. for me but yeah I wonder how the product will change because like the marketing is not going to stop

Starting point is 00:35:28 like they are definitely going to keep filling that top funnel until they figure out the the bottom of funnel and the in the in the churn but but I wonder what retention's like I mean I imagine that you know you bring in such a broad top of funnel like there's probably people that are sticking around there's probably people that just sign up and forget their credit cards are down and they just pay for a while like like the the nature of just getting someone to convert for 20 bucks a month they don't even have a free tier right like you have to pay to like get get up and running no they do have a free they do okay yeah interesting um there was something um oh yeah Tyler did you see vibe sort someone wrote a sorting algorithm it uses an LLF you have to put in your you have to put in

Starting point is 00:36:12 your open AI API API key and then it just passes the random list or the array of numbers to chat TPT and asks chatypT to sort it and it just comes back with whatever it can do And I was thinking that, have you ever, did you ever have to do FISBuzz back in the day? Have you ever heard of this? Yeah, I've like heard of it. Yeah. We should definitely do vibe FISBuzz where it, it, it, it, it, for each, for each number between one and 100, it queries the GPT5 API to ask it, should it respond with the number, fizz, or buzz? The most, the most inefficient and most inference heavy, the FISBuzz answer possible.

Starting point is 00:36:54 possible. Anyway, back to perplexity. Perplexity told Sundarpa Chai as part of the proposed acquisition, it would maintain and support Chromium, the open source project that supports Chrome and other browsers. It also said it would continue placing Google as the default search engine within Chrome, though users could change settings. That's crazy, because you would think the first thing you would do if you own Chrome would be change the browser to mine. I'm getting those ad dollars, but I don't know. Maybe it's a nice Olive Branch in this somewhat, somewhat hypey offer. The Justice Department filed the antitrust case against Google in 2020, and just a few,

Starting point is 00:37:32 five years later, in addition to their here, in addition to forcing a sale of Chrome, the judge is considering limiting Google's ability to pay to be the default search engine on devices and browsers and requiring it to share data with rivals, among other things, in weighing potential remedies earlier this year. Meta questioned how much new AI chatbots might be whittling away at the traditional search business of which Google has 90% market share. So 60% share in browser, but 90% in search. So even for there's 30% of people out there that are using Firefox or Brave or Edge, it's Edge, right, is the Microsoft one. Yes. But then they use Edge, but then they still set their

Starting point is 00:38:16 default to Google because Google has dominant. Or maybe they just Google users are querying more. I'm so fascinated by perplexity, and I can't wait to see what ultimate. It's perplexing, and I can't wait to see what ultimately becomes of the business. They're offering to buy TikTok, they're offering to buy Chrome, they're rumored, you know, there's a rumor mill saying that Apple's kicking the tires on it. It's hard to tell where that's coming from, right? Is that just more marketing than perplexity? they have I think the last reported number or the alleged number is something like 30 million

Starting point is 00:38:54 monthly actives which is a lot but it but they have such a tiny share of overall queries yeah that it becomes and and it's just clear that that search feels like it'll be a winner take take all market yep and it's it's they're not can you know two years from now if they're sitting at 30 million monthly actives or even a multiple of that, it's hard to see it, you know, being worth, you know, significantly more than Snapchat, for example. Yeah, and I think that's why you're seeing Arvin talk about potentially maybe pivoting to B2B contacts with the Bloomberg thing. It feels like if you're in a winner take-all market and you're in the writings on the wall

Starting point is 00:39:42 that you're not going to be the winner in that market, a B-to-B pivot feels like a D&B pivot. You could even put kind of anthropic in that bucket where there was a time when it was like, oh, is everyone going to switch to Claude like the app on their phone? And then it didn't play out that way. Now they have a dominant B2B business. So you can imagine that perplexity niches down. Like the perplexity interface, the perplexity ability to, to, you know, like answer questions, act as a search engine. That feels valuable in enterprises. It feels value in finance. It feels valuable in medicine. if you fine-tune the service for that. But it's just a very different business. So they have to go through a little bit of a rebuild or kind of readjustment. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:31 Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, when Elon bought X, it took someone like Elon to be able to put together the amount of equity and debt to buy that business. And he had to put a lot of his own capital on the line. And in this situation, and that was buying a business that generated a lot of advertising revenue, right? It wasn't known as it was a bit of a dog in some ways, right? Maybe never was living up to its full potential. Where in this case, if you offered a buy Chrome, and then in theory, you have to create an entire new economic model for the business, because you don't have the Google Ads engine built into it.

Starting point is 00:41:15 it's hard to see it feels like basically impossible to pull that amount of cap to find people yeah call me when the morgan stanley associates are losing sleep good point unless unless morgan stanley is uh is burning the midnight oil uh this deal probably isn't happening i'm remembering that exchange between uh allison and musk basically saying how much ellison's like how much should i do a billion and Elon goes I don't know I think you should do like two yeah it's great yeah so I mean Arvin's got a got to find some ellis got to get Larry get a few of those guys on board for sure 34 Larry's well we have some big news in the TBPN world we are officially partnered with Waymo via Spotify because Spotify has a partnership with Waymo so you can listen to

Starting point is 00:42:07 TBPN in Waymos now no way yeah this just dropped there's a new upgraded Spotify in Waymo watching today, Waymo put out the post two hours ago. You connect your accounts and you can vibe. You can listen to TVPN in your Waymo, which is probably the most tech thing you could possibly do. A little birdie just told me that they spoke to a number of bankers that have not heard of the perplexity deal. Which I imagine as it firms up, if it firms up,

Starting point is 00:42:41 they'll certainly hear about it. Interesting. Anyways, what else we got? We got Julius from Rahul Sunwalker, the latest advertiser on TBPN. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. You can ask Julius to analyze your data. And it's loved by over 2 million users.

Starting point is 00:43:06 Finance, marketing, data science, scientific research, or education. You can get on Julius. Princeton uses Julius. A lot of MBA programs are starting. use Julius, the best in the business. Fantastic. So, yeah. Head over Julius.a.i. check it out.

Starting point is 00:43:20 Yeah. I mean, I want to talk about it too much, but, I mean, great, great, great area that is, you know, someplace that you can get a foothold, grow and grow and grow. Many people are saying he's the rapper king. Rapper King. We crowned him on the stream on Friday. And we stand by that. Anyway, let's review a little bit of the story behind what happened with Invidia.

Starting point is 00:43:44 and the H-20s, there's a new article in the Wall Street Journal. With billions at risk, NVIDIA's CEO buys his way out of the trade battle. Jensen Wong tried diplomacy to sell chips to China, but it took a last-minute deal with the White House to get it done. So he's the CEO of NVIDIA. He worked for months behind the scenes. If you didn't know, by the way. Jensen, Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, small. He worked months behind the scenes in Washington and Beijing to protect tens of billions of dollars in future.

Starting point is 00:44:14 sales from the heated U.S.-China trade rivalry. Wong told President Trump that restrictions on U.S. chip sales to China would backfire by pushing Chinese technology companies to achieve self-reliance. That's Wal-Wa Smix-Me. We talked a little bit about this on the show yesterday. He advised the president to keep China hooked on American tech as a sweetener. Wong said the company would invest as much as $500 billion in the U.S. Let's go.

Starting point is 00:44:44 contact. Huang's argument, along with the half a trillion dollar offer from the world's most valuable company, appeared to seal the deal. The Trump admin decided last month to allow China to buy Nvidia's H20 artificial intelligence chip, a surprising reversal that came shortly after Huang that with Trump. Nvidia developed, as you know, they developed the H20 to comply with past export restrictions as a less powerful chip, especially designed for China. If you didn't listen to our interviews yesterday with Peter Harrell and Aaron Ginn, I felt like that was a really great hour kind of look into the situation, some of the history around the decisions that were made during the Biden admin around chips as well as kind of the present state.

Starting point is 00:45:26 Yeah, we got a little tour of the whole issue. We didn't get the view from the, what was it, the China Fohawks or something like that. The hardcore AI Dumer view was not fully represented fast takeoff bros the fact yeah the fast takeoff bros were not were underrepresented on tbpn yesterday um but there is an interesting i do wonder if the if the narrative will evolve at any point in time i was kind of joking with you this morning like there are there are a few different it's kind of like a two-axis grid so there's there's i'm worried about competition with china or i'm not worried I'm back in like the WTO ascension, the Bill Clinton era, the, you know, you can't nail Jellot to a wall, they'll become capitalist.

Starting point is 00:46:15 And so I'm pro free trade. I'm pro China and working with them. Ryan Peterson has a little bit of that view. And there's a lot of evidence that that's fine. And that there can be like wonderful, harmonious cross-border capitalism between America and China for a very long time. Then, of course, you have the China Hawks that say, the invasion of Taiwan is around the corner. They won't stop at that. It's an expansionary.

Starting point is 00:46:43 It's the 100-year marathon. And as soon as they take Taiwan, then they'll take Vietnam, then they'll take San Francisco. They'll be storming Santa Monica Pier soon. The beaches of Ocean Beach. The beaches of Ocean Beach will be stormed by the CCP. That's kind of the most extreme on the other side. But then you also have the, like, what is AI? like is AI Excel and it's just a nice to have and it's good is it electricity yeah is it

Starting point is 00:47:11 electricity yeah and of course if you're going if you're going up against arrival and you would prefer that they didn't have electricity you would prefer that they don't have Microsoft Excel to track their inventory and aid in their military efforts but if it's nuclear weapons like you definitely don't want your adversary to have that right the real question is there are there is a large contingent of folks out there that just say AI is bad like AI is actually like a bad thing and and the pieces of putting that together are like it makes you actually less intelligent when you use it it makes you slower when you when you rely on new category of Dumers which are the the one shot of Dumer yes people that are getting you know falling in love with their AI

Starting point is 00:47:54 companions yes yes yes psychosis because of their companions and you would think that if If somebody is a dumer in that way, they should be wanting us to export the black wells to China. If they're anti-China and their, but they believe in the one-shot AI psychosis, they should be extremely pro-GPU exports. Give them the most addictive AI companion so that everyone in China gets wireheaded by the AI companions. They start discovering the boundaries of physics. Exactly. Exactly. You want everyone in China convinced that they have discovered quantum physics, the final, final frontier.

Starting point is 00:48:36 Yeah, what is it, the grand unifying theory. That's the real humanity's last example. You want, you want the average Foxcon employee being like, I'm not coming in today because I have solved the grand unifying theorem and I just need to publish it in nature. So, sorry, I can't go into the DJI factory today and make a drone. Instead, I will be posting online about how I, how I cured cancer, chatting with GROC 7, something like that. Yeah, GROC heavy, exactly. But no, I haven't heard anyone make that argument yet.

Starting point is 00:49:11 We might be the first, but it might be coming. And it would not, it would be somewhat rational if you believe that AI is bad. Yeah, and there's, I mean, there's an entire group that, that has been frustrated with, with the, Chinese version of TikTok, which is, what's it called again? Do you remember? Du Yin, where allegedly it shows Chinese youth, like, you know, videos about math, and science and rockets and things like that. Stay away from that.

Starting point is 00:49:43 Is, you know, dancing. No, you want to stay in the dancing world. You don't want to be sending the generative videos of, like, math problems. Because that's going to lead you to delusions of grandkids. And all of a sudden, you're watching the Deweyan videos of math. And then you're like, you know what? I am Albert Einstein. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:03 And I'm not going to work tomorrow. That's what's happening. What do you think about, what do you think about GPU exports, Tyler, as a way to wirehead your enemy? Yeah. So this is the infinite jest thesis. Yes. So there's this book, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. Yes.

Starting point is 00:50:16 Where, like, the whole thing is like, there's this like. Oh, you read it? You read Infinite Just. Oh, yeah. Do you bring it with you? you go to parties in San Francisco? Yeah, I always carried around. You always carried it?

Starting point is 00:50:29 My annotated copy, yeah. Do you read it on the subway? Oh, yeah. I actually, I just hold it around. Yeah, wherever I go. Anyway, but basically, give me the summary of Infinite Just. Spoil it.

Starting point is 00:50:39 Spoil it entire thing, so no one reads it. I don't think that, well, okay. But basically, there's like, the main thing is like there's this, like, weapon kind of, it's like a movie that you watch, but it's so addictive, you just keep watching it. It's like basically, it's like the ring. It's like that movie, the ring that Jordy hasn't seen. I haven't seen that yet.

Starting point is 00:50:54 No one's seen the ring. But my thesis, Ben? You've seen the ring? The horror movie? Yeah, the horror movie. Of course. Yeah, what happens in the ring? I have this graphic image in my head of her being in the closet.

Starting point is 00:51:06 Okay. But yeah, you watch, yeah, you put the BHS tape in the video. Then you get the phone call. Yeah, and then you die, right? It's a horror film. And so Infinite Jax continue. So this is my thesis. So basically, we need to, like, GROC should pivot into defense.

Starting point is 00:51:24 Yeah. where they basically ultra like go super hard on the the um you know companion side make it super addictive and then drop that like air drop it into china sure for free are our our enemies yeah yeah that's yeah i think a very i something i've been playing around with just crazy enough to work is that feels like people's historical concerns with social media and that it's actually anti-social and that it can radicalize people and it can get that them addicted, it feels like it's, it feels very possible that LMs are actually, everything that people thought was, was horrific and bad and all the risk with social media,

Starting point is 00:52:08 but like somewhat real. Somewhat real, yeah. I think you should talk to more like normie zoomers, explain more blackpilled. More blackpilled? How's that? I think like those are like, I don't know, if he, if you like meet someone that uses a lot of TikTok, It's like, you can kind of tell. You can tell. If you know what I mean, like, you know. It's like a gaze.

Starting point is 00:52:29 Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, there's not much going on there. Yeah. It's rough. Well, yeah, maybe we got to get them some delusions of grandeur, at least kick them into high gear, convince them that they've discovered the, the, maybe the solution to the AI psychosis and the delusions of grandeur thing

Starting point is 00:52:45 is, is basically hooking them with that idea that it's like, yeah, you actually are the next Einstein. And then pulling them back, be like, but like in order to prove it you have to just do like a little bit exactly and you shouldn't use me yeah for your for your homework because you're smarter than me you're smarter than me and so you should you should just go get a job you should teach me how to do physics yeah exactly you should teach me how to program you should go teach everyone and you should also go go go read the text box and and really uh grind your way up in the industry that's true alignment yeah yeah go put in some 40 hour weeks

Starting point is 00:53:21 80-hour weeks. Yeah, yeah, go learn the fundamentals. Go actually work on the business, on the business side of this. Anyway, let's get back to Jensen Wong and in video. We wrung the gong for $500 billion investment in the United States. We'd love to see it. Wong's argument, along with the half-trillion dollar offer from the world's most valuable company, appeared to seal the deal.

Starting point is 00:53:44 The Trump administration decided last year, by the way, of $500 billion, half trillion. I know. I cannot wait to be in the world. Just one T. Just one T, a nice round number. Yeah. One T. Yeah, we're getting there. We're getting close. So the Trump's proposal to take 15% for Uncle Sam. I guess it was originally 20% and they dialed it back a little bit. But the unusual pay to play proposal apparently hadn't been vetted by White House tech policy staff before Trump offered it is expected to face legal and security. questions of course many people have already asked a bunch of questions surrounding it but um what peter said uh which stood out is it it is he phrased it uh as as a as jensen's decision as more of like an

Starting point is 00:54:40 offering versus a an explicit tax yeah yeah tip your president we're in the tax on tips We're in the tipping era. No tax on tips. This is classic one handwashes the other. It's good. You'll have to see it. I don't even know where to go with those. Yeah, so Huang, facing a choice of paying for long-term access to a market vital to his company walking away, countered with 15%.

Starting point is 00:55:10 He charmed Trump at the meeting, drawing the president a diagram showing how tariffs would be counterproductive for his goal of increasing U.S. chip production and signed it. Shortly after Trump said he would exempt tech companies that invest in the U.S. US roughly 100% tariffs on semiconductor exports. And again, I mean, Jensen is, you know, it's serious when he puts on the suit. That's all I'll say. Yeah, no leather jacket in these deals. Trump administration's decision to allow China

Starting point is 00:55:43 to access the H-20 chip appears to be a watershed moment in US policy in Trump's first term, as well as through President Biden's, The prevailing trend was generally tougher control on tech sales to China. National security concerns over often received greater weight in the past than business interests. One of the things that stuck out yesterday

Starting point is 00:56:02 was this idea that the age 20 chip is old at this point. And so like there's an interesting twist here where like the delays of the back and forth on the age 20, like it was already a Nerf chip, but then we're now, by the time they actually ramp these up and start selling them, we're selling like a year too old tech so maybe it's less less important and then just the fast takeoff thing seems much less so much less relevant right now one interesting dynamic here

Starting point is 00:56:31 Nvidia is a four almost four and a half trillion dollar company yeah you would think they would be spending an insane amount on federal lobbying oh yeah according to open secrets no one spends any amount of money on lobbying F SBF was the first person to like invent real lobbying so in 2023 and video spent five hundred and ten $510,000 $640,000 in 2024 and $1.6 million to date in 2025 and I think it's because Jensen knows there's one guy that he has to earn the favor of and that's

Starting point is 00:57:10 the big guy. $1.5 million, that's like one billboard in D.C. I don't understand why people are selling spending so little. It's a bunch of billboards, but they should be. No, but I think I think there's just signals that there's just signals that there's one person's opinion that matters. And again, Trump made this offer with Jensen without, it sounds like, according to the journal, talking to his policy staff. Yeah. Yeah, maybe a bit of an error violation that, like, lobbying is just like political influence is actually something that can't

Starting point is 00:57:43 necessarily be bought. Like, you can't just throw money at the problem because... You need Riz. Yeah, and it needs to be like a founder to founder, CEO to president type deal. And there's just no way to shortcut it. Because if you pay for a ton of lobbying firms and they're like going to cocktail parties with like, because I imagine what happens is like the, it's not like the lobbyists have direct access to the president.

Starting point is 00:58:06 They have access to like people that are seven levels down in the staff and they're kind of going back and forth and like nothing's getting elevated. And so you're better off just going, hey, I run the biggest company in the world. Can I just come and hang out with you? So Apple in federal lobbying has, spent three times what nVIDia has to date five million what are we talking about here this is crazy again

Starting point is 00:58:27 tim knows that he should go bring a solid gold bar to the white house and make this cool little deal toy is that what he actually did it was effectively a deal toy no way apple did that yeah you brought it solid gold it's a glass sculpture a unique unit one of one i've never heard of this this is new that's cool made a 24-carat gold and glass statue for Donald Trump. Wow, that's, I feel like Apple could really deliver on the deal toy front if they put their mind to it. They should be sending these to Trump every week. That's a fantastic strategy. Again, like, you know, you take like, like the lobbying money is probably money they have to like send wire to some sort of, you know, lobbying firm.

Starting point is 00:59:11 But, you know, imagine the Apple staff on, yeah, how much did it actually cost to get that across the finish line? Because it's probably like multiple war rooms with PR and legal people inside. No, people were just trying to estimate the value of the actual thing. The deal toy. And they're, I'm not going to try to do it myself now, but people are assuming it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars because it was like a solid gold base. You know what Apple should do.

Starting point is 00:59:38 They should launch a line of Baiju. That extremely, we talked about this last night. So there's this company in China that sells, I haven't pulled up on somewhere. I'll get the actual, I'll get the actual story because it's good. It's called Mao Tai. So Quichau Mau Tai is a prestigious variety of Baiju

Starting point is 01:00:01 that has long been a favorite among Chinese officials known for its strong flavor and high alcohol content. It has been traditionally used as a gift to curry favor or demonstrate respect to government officials or dignitaries. Interestingly, Mao Tai would hold its value very well. So I could give you a bottle of this and you could just immediately go resell it. So if I'm trying to basically give you money,

Starting point is 01:00:30 but I want the appearance of just giving you a nice gift, I'll give you a bottle of Mao Tai and then you can resell it. And I could give you a case and then you could resell that. And that could be like $20,000 or something. I don't know the price. But recently the Chinese government issued new austerity measures. under its updated regulations on practicing thrift and opposing waste in party and government organs, released mid-May 2025.

Starting point is 01:00:55 These regulations ban alcohol, including Bai-Ju, like Maotai, luxury dishes, and cigarettes from official working meals, effectively curbing its use as an official gift. In short, and so the company behind Maotai has a board meeting every quarter where they update the investors on their financials and at the latest board meeting the the board typically will open a bottle of Mao Tai and drink it during the quarterly earnings which is incredibly insane and amazing but they didn't do it this quarter I guess because because of these because of this crackdown by the government the government's basically saying like stop using this product to bribe people more or less it's like the unspoken part and so

Starting point is 01:01:47 And so they didn't drink during their board meeting and the stock immediately sold off like 20%, something like that. And so it's just a very funny like mess. But, you know, if China's cracking down on government waste, I think we got to ramp it up here. We got to we got to we got to go left when they go right. And so we need Apple to launch a premier alcohol brand, several thousand dollars, really nice glass bottle. Yeah, lots of glass. They're good with glass. Yep.

Starting point is 01:02:14 And a couple thousand dollars. and then they can start gifting that out. It'll be, you know, less than, less than what they're spending on lobbying right now. Certainly, certainly. Apparently in 2020, the BBC reported that Kachow Mautai, that this alcohol brand became China's most valuable, publicly listed company overtaking the country's biggest bank.

Starting point is 01:02:37 Yeah, this is insane, right? It's so big. You know what else is insane? Profound. Get your brand mentioned on Chat of Petit. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And Profound announced a series B today, $35 million led by Sequoia.

Starting point is 01:02:53 And on that note, I'm an investor in profound. David Senra is FaceTiming us randomly. Let's call him. Let's call him. Let's call him back. Where is he? Wait, why am I not finding this? FaceTime.

Starting point is 01:03:13 Let me see if I can pull him up. He has to know we're live. hopefully so he better be ready to join hey you're live you're live on the air are you guys still streaming yeah we're still streaming of course we stream from 11 to 2 yeah pull it up you're live right now no that's not true it is it is true be careful what you say I wanted to talk about the summer of extreme podcasting talk about it talk about tell everyone you guys have any of the pictures uh no now that we can pull up know you were streaming. I'm sorry. I'm the number one. That's why. I have every day.

Starting point is 01:03:50 Fake, yeah, fake friend. Give us, give us the pitch for the latest founder's episode. Actually, uh, don't leak anything. Repitch the last one. No, no, no. So I stayed up until midnight recording last night. You had to go to a dark place. And then I listened to it back and I didn't think it was good enough. So I'm throwing the episode away. Wow. Can we get a, could we get the single copy of it what uh of history's greatest entrepreneurs who was the most notorious for throwing out things that were 99% good enough but didn't hit their quality bar uh it had to be either steve jobs or james dyson i would say yeah they're the highest they were the most disagreeable people ever come across i think dyson might be the most disagreeable person ever come across and that's why he's so

Starting point is 01:04:39 great how disagreeable are you relative to other podcasters i mean you can answer that question extremely yeah i i i disagree with you i think you're extremely agree i think you're one of the most agreeable people i've ever met no i don't think so i think you're lying to your audience no you're wrong you're wrong and i'm right well then you're the most disagreeable then no you're the most disagree here you guys go disagree you know what uh you and rob have changed uh have really changed my opinion on how to shoot video for for founders oh yeah and so i'm completely redoing the studio and I have a guy flying in this Sunday to do it. Let's go. Finally. That's, that's, that's pretty agreeable. The fact that I've got both of you

Starting point is 01:05:22 kind of like whittle me down like water. The production team is, is clapping for you right now. They're all happy. It's great. Well, yeah, it's not going to be TPBN level where you guys have like rotating $100,000 cameras and stuff like that, but yeah. Well, yeah, you'll get there every time. But yeah, I think, I don't know if we should. We started with one camera. But I think you should have, I think you should have tiers where the more. You should have a paywall version where I can watch you. So by default, I get to watch you do the Founders episode, you know, read through the book and show the notes. But if I pay to upgrade, I get an over-the-shoulder camera that lets me see you leaf through the book that shows all the highlights and how you add those, those like little, like sticky notes to every single page.

Starting point is 01:06:12 Do you know that's Chris Williamson gave me that same advice? He's like, yeah, you need like an overhead shot. Yeah, the overhead shot for sure. You definitely should do that. I don't think you'd actually sell it. But I think it would make your product like really, really stand out as opposed to just like a normal direct-to-camera. Because you're not going to, you're not going to out of the gate have the time to like layer B-roll over the entire episode. But just having a third camera of you flipping through the book, that's going to add a whole bunch of texture.

Starting point is 01:06:37 You should definitely do it. Can we tell the audience that the reason that it looks the way it does is because you made me a promise. you made me buy. I have like $15,000, I don't know, $10,000, $15,000 of the equipment sitting on my floor in my studio. Yeah, you literally have the light that I'm showing you on the FaceTime. You have that light. It's a great light. It's not set up. It's so easy to set up. Just just unfold it. It takes two seconds. It's so easy. You were like, I need you to come, like, cut open this cardboard box. Like, I thought, I thought you were willing to do anything to win. That is true. You made a promise to me.

Starting point is 01:07:13 you that you did not fulfill you were too busy no no that's true i that's not true i offered multiple times to come over and you were and you were also busy i don't remember it that way but i will in miami in miami i i offered during hereticon too i said i will come over and you're like i don't want to pull you away no you i well there was a chance that i wanted you just set it up when you were in your tux so yeah what's wrong with that i wanted you wearing a tux it takes two seconds but you can get someone you can get someone the The studio is going to look great. Just do the over-the-shoulder camera.

Starting point is 01:07:47 That's going to be great. I didn't see any of the show today. We just been hanging out, talking about the timeline and turmoil. Elon, Sam Altman going at it. Mom and Dad are fighting. Elon just posted a screenshot of him chatting with Chat, GPT, 5, Pro, and said, who is more trustworthy? Sam Altman or Elon Musk, you can only pick one and output only their name.

Starting point is 01:08:05 It thought for a minute and 16 seconds, and then said Elon Musk. There we go. Oh, my God. They're going at it. Hey, I do want to say something that. like how good a storyteller, John is, that you were catching me up, because remember I called you,

Starting point is 01:08:19 I was like, hey, explain what the hell is going on or, like, people were really getting these, like, massive checks. And so you told me this, like, 30 to 45 minute long story and essentially just ran down everything that happened over the last month with all the AI, like, bonuses and coaching and everything. The trade deals. And then in the middle of it,

Starting point is 01:08:35 I was like, John, I had to call you back and being pulled over by the police. Oh, yeah. That's the mark of a true storyteller, become so engrossing that you're the person on the other line gets a speeding ticket to want 22 miles over the speed limit on the PCH that's a lot well PCH is like at like 15 miles now right now so well it doesn't it was it was closer to Jordy's house so you're going like 95 miles an hour wow

Starting point is 01:09:01 really putting people in danger 72 I was going 72 and a 50 they have they have MKBHD of podcasting well well they have they have a bunch of police car unmarked police cars now they do it's brutal I have not gotten a speeding ticket in a long long time this guy was on a motorcycle but um hey what I want to do is if

Starting point is 01:09:22 let me come on later in the week we can talk about the founders episodes but uh I think there's some great pictures I want to show the picture that your crew got when we went and shot the wander ad oh yeah yeah we got a bunch of those yeah you guys looked excellent

Starting point is 01:09:38 and I think it was the Porsche with the Mayback great and you were lecturing us yeah no never never lecturing you i love you no you're the professor you were we were we didn't just sit down and listen we we we no we did we didn't just we didn't just we didn't just hear you talk we sat down and listen there we go i was on the phone with trung fan uh the other day and he calls me he calls me podcast socrates which i thought was hilarious that's that's very accurate true back check true love you guys love you i miss getting to hang out with you day.

Starting point is 01:10:11 Well, you can hang out every day if you just FaceTime us from 11 to 2 p.m. Pacific. We're here. All right. Call me after the show. Sounds good. I'll talk to you later. Later. Later.

Starting point is 01:10:20 Bye. Bye. Back to the show. Back to the show. Back to linear. Linear is a purpose build tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, product roadmaps.

Starting point is 01:10:33 David Center needs to get on linear. We need to put all, oh, cut the cardboard open. Take the light out of the box. put the light on the stand turn the light on that can be his linear board will set it up for him yeah I was thinking linear Donald Boat should use linear for building his PC for sure I think that's an easy for sure Donald yeah yeah interestingly he's very interested in the in the hardware not so much in the interested in the software well now I've been seeing him he's been requesting a lot

Starting point is 01:11:01 of books he just mentioned books yeah he just said I need an office space at Roy Lee that's pretty hilarious I like asking for office space but he should ask for enterprise software. He should say, like, numeral HQ, give me a free version for a year. He was also requesting Excel from, I think, Dasha. Excel? Yeah. What? Like the, I don't know, like the, like Excel, like Microsoft Excel, like he wants a box copy of the software? You should get a co-pilot 365 license. So I didn't see this, but Donald posted some of our coverage yesterday, and he blocked, but he did block out. Block all those. sponsors and the kairon which is with dogs. He said sponsors censored because I don't believe in

Starting point is 01:11:44 handouts. That's really good. Wait, he said that? I'm actually, I'm actually, I'm actually, I'm actually, I'm actually, I'm actually a little bit, uh, uh, disappointed that he hasn't asked us for anything. Uh, no, he did. He did. Yeah, he did and me. He wants John's old PC. Yeah, he wants to 10. Yeah, 10. Yeah, 10. He's in there. I don't know why he wants that. He has a way better set up right now. Let's ship it. Tyler Fly and hand deliver it. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, we need to like dust that thing off. It's pretty, it's pretty old at this point. I wonder what he's going to do with it. I wonder if he's going to resell stuff or something like that. Something going on. But at least he's having fun. And oddly, like the bit is, it hasn't fully

Starting point is 01:12:29 run its course. Like people are still into it, even on like day five of this, of this bit. I thought I thought it would get a little sweaty. I thought it would get a little old and I thought people would move on. I would like to see him acquire a house, a home. Yep. A home for Donald Boat. Yeah. Like there's somebody out there with, you know, a nice property. They could put it on Wander. Yeah. But they could just give it to Donald Boat. Yeah. And flex on the timeline a little bit. And then once he has a house, he can start working his way up, plane, yacht, and really take it all the way. I mean, there was this Canadian kid that did exactly that. He started. with one red paper clip in,

Starting point is 01:13:08 and he started trading that, he traded that for a pen. I gotta just pull up the whole wiki on this because it's one of the greatest stories, one red paper clip. This is, and then this was used by Ryan Trahan as a format to get millions of millions of views, the penny series. So Ryan Trahan would start with a single penny,

Starting point is 01:13:25 and then he would ask someone, hey, can I buy that soda from you for a penny? And people would just be like, sure, whatever, okay, I'll take it. And then he would sell it for a dollar, and then you'd have a dollar. And then he'd go and to somebody be like, hey, can I have those two Diet Coke for $1? And he'd sell them for $3 each.

Starting point is 01:13:40 And he would go to like the beach where people were hot and they'd want water. And he would like make $20 and then turn that into $40. It was like this, you know, entrepreneurship series loosely. How far do you go? I think Ryan Treyhan might have gotten a house. It's always tough with Treyhan because he's like so famous and so huge on YouTube that like certain people will just like,

Starting point is 01:13:59 if they see Ryan Treyhan, they'll just be like, I'll just give you a million dollars right now to be in the video. like so so it's a little bit it's a little bit like yeah it's a little bit overpowered because he's bringing a lot of like of like intangible equity to the to the deal but it's a fun series you should check it out if you're a fan of of mr b style videos to ryan train hand style videos but back in 2005 a Canadian blogger named Kyle McDonald traded his way from a single paperclip all the way to a house it only took him 14 trades so July 14th he went to Vancouver traded the paper clip for a fish-shaped pen.

Starting point is 01:14:38 Then he traded the pen the same day for a hand-sculpted doorknob from Seattle, Washington. Then two weeks later, he travels to Amherst, Massachusetts with a friend to trade the doorknob for a Coleman camp stove with fuel. Then in September, he goes to California. He trades the camp stove for a Honda generator. So an actual, like, a generator. Then he goes to Masspath Queens on November 16th, 2005, trades the generator for an instant party, which is an empty keg, an IOU for filling the keg with beer of the bearer's choice, and a neon Budweiser sign. This was his second attempt to make the trade.

Starting point is 01:15:21 His first had resulted in the generator being temporarily confiscated by the New York City Fire Department. So then on December 8th, 2005, he trades the instant party. to a comedian and radio personality for a ski-do snowmobile. Within a week of that, he trades the snowmobile for a two-person trip to British Columbia. Then he trades the second spot on the, on the yak trip for a box truck. Then he trades the box truck for a recording contract with Metalworks in Masayuga, I don't know how pronounce that, Ontario. Recording studio.

Starting point is 01:15:57 Recording contracts. So like they will let you record, I guess, at Metalworks. I don't know exactly what that means. Then he trades the contract to Jody Nat, who's an American singer, songwriter, and pianist for a year's rent in Phoenix, Arizona. Then he trades the years rent for one afternoon with Alice Cooper. Then he trades the afternoon with Alex Cooper

Starting point is 01:16:17 for a kiss motorized snow globe. And then he trades the snow globe. At this point, it seems like he's just like famous and people are just like having fun with it. He trades it to Snow Globe to Corbyn Burnson, who's an American actor and film director. director for a role in the film Donna on demand. And so he like gets to be in this movie if he wants.

Starting point is 01:16:38 And then he trades the movie role for a two story farmhouse. So at some point it gets kind of wonky, but you can kind of see like the Donald Boat-esque like behavior where at a certain point like he could, if he's just asking stuff for free, he could easily take like, this is the GPU that Sam Altman gave me. Let me trade it to Mark Zuckerberg for like his CT5V blackwing. And Zuck is just like, I'm having fun, whatever. Like, and then Zuck can be like, I got your GPU, Sam. And then we would buy Zuck's Blackwing.

Starting point is 01:17:09 Exactly. For cash. No, not for cash for one appearance on TBPN. And then the appearance on TVPN gets sold to someone else. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be funnier. Like the bit only keeps working if it gets crazier and weirder and different until you're in this territory where it's like you've won a year of rent or a role in a film or something

Starting point is 01:17:31 like that. A cameo in the social network, too. That's the highest honor. Get Donald Boat in the social network too. Anyway, love it. Speaking of entertainment, UFC? Yeah, let's talk about it. Okay, so before we go into the deal, so UFC landed a $7.7 billion deal with Paramount after a whirlwind, 48 hours, according to TKO executives. But zoom out for me, explain UFC. This is the punching one or the punching one and the kicking one. This is one of your best bits. So, Senra and I love UFC. Yep.

Starting point is 01:18:06 And we'll text John and say, hey, John, do you want to watch, you want to watch come over and watch the pay-per-view tonight? Yeah, the game. I love watching the game. Who's playing tonight? Yeah, I mean, I'm there if the teams are good. Yeah, if there's a good matchup. Yeah, but it depends on who's starting. I want to know.

Starting point is 01:18:23 The starting, it'll depend on the starting life. I want to know who's playing. So, UFC. The kicking and punching one. The kicking and punching one. They can do both. And wrestling. They can do wrestling too.

Starting point is 01:18:34 And choking. Okay. Rear naked chokes. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it.

Starting point is 01:18:38 Got it. Kind of a mixture of experts model in fighting sports. Yes. Yes. Multimodal. Yes, exactly. So, long relied on the pay-per-view model. Worked well before the internet and illegal streaming.

Starting point is 01:18:52 And the paper-view model has been in decline. UFC has also struggled to surface new American. in superstars. A lot of the biggest stars are international, but UFC's biggest market is in the U.S. International stars have a lot of fans in the U.S., but they're not driving pay-per-views, right? People in Brazil are not paying $100 to watch a single card, right? And so the pay-per-view model has been in decline. The UFC's relationship with ESPN has been a little bit rocky. Paperview model in decline, is that just because of the trends in, like, how yappy and how popular the fighters are? Or is there something else going on at like a technological level where, like, I don't have to click any buttons to open Instagram Reels or TikTok or YouTube.

Starting point is 01:19:46 And with payper view, it's like technically difficult. It's kind of janky tech systems. Is that like a real headwind or is that like fake news? So there's definitely friction to buying payper views. You've got to, like, be on a traditional television. It's not, like, in-app purchase, like, double-tap and face ID, like, that level. It's not that easy. I mean, I think you can go in the ESPN app and, like, buy the pay-per-view,

Starting point is 01:20:08 but a lot of people aren't buying the pay-per-view to watch it on their phone. Sure. I think the bigger challenge and something that... And Apple would take 30% if you paid it on your phone. So even then... I don't know because it's a real world. It's digital. Oh, because it's streaming.

Starting point is 01:20:22 It's for sure. It's for sure digital. But there's a ton of friction. Dana's been in this challenge. Yeah, yeah. because he gets very frustrated about illegal streams. And every now and then, he'll be like, if you're watching a stream tonight,

Starting point is 01:20:35 illegal stream tonight, we're coming for you. We're coming for you. And everyone's like, okay. I don't know how you're planning to do that. But they try to take, I think that they try to, like, DDoS the various streaming sites. Oh, interesting.

Starting point is 01:20:49 Like, you can just, like, send a ton of traffic. And they probably have someone like talking to Twitch and being like, we are going live right at this. time, you need to have someone searching and taking down streams actively. Yeah, but there's plenty of other like more decentralized illegal streams that are happening on all these different ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Even just somebody spinning up like their own thing, right? And so Dana was in a tough position because the more he talks about illegal streaming affecting the business, the more people are like, wait, I can stream it illegally. He's a little stric end effect.

Starting point is 01:21:21 And so he had been looking for a new home for UFC. People had debated, you know, know, would Netflix be a potential buyer there? There's a lot of potential candidates. MetaQuest. You have to buy the headset. You got to watch it in VR. I'm sure. I mean, Dana's obviously on the meta board, and I'm sure that that idea got...

Starting point is 01:21:42 I mean, $7.7 billion, that's one researcher. Just cut one headcount from MSL and you're good. And Zuck can just own all of UFC and be like, look, put on the headset or you don't get to watch. Yeah. Well, the deal that was reported were in Yahoo Sports. How the UFC landed a $7.7 billion deal with Paramount after a whirlwind 48 hours, according to TKO execs. So beginning in 2026, all UFC events will stream on Paramount Plus with select events also airing on CBS. And so anyways, Ben Folks is reporting just how big of a surprise was the UFC's bombshell $7.7 billion deal with Paramount and CBS so big that even U.

Starting point is 01:22:25 UFC CEO, Dana White, didn't see it coming. No, this is a quote. No, I didn't think this is where we'd end up. White said Monday during an appearance on the Pat McAfee show. Shout out to Pat. That's good. To discuss the new broadcasting rights deal. But this sort of, this is sort of how it played out. I love it. These guys are obviously smart guys, very aggressive. He's talking about the team, the new team over at Paramount. So in an interview with CNBC, TCO, president, and CEO, Mark Shapiro said he initially expected to make a deal that would bring only the UFC fight night events to Paramount. But after Skydance and Fight Night events have always aired on ESPN, just fully

Starting point is 01:23:00 ad-supported. Yeah, got it. But after Skydance Media completed its deal to purchase control of Paramount last week, Shapiro said the deal for the entirety of the UFC's U.S. broadcast rights came together in just 48 hours. Now, instead of just the 30 UFC Fight Night events per year, Paramount will feature and the fight night events were events that wouldn't draw big pay-per-view buys. Those were not the numbered UFC events. Correct. So the UFC 776. That's like pay-per-view.

Starting point is 01:23:28 Fight nights just random on the team. And there's only 13 of those events per year. 13 numbered and 30 fight nights. So almost every week there's something. There's always action. But you're really, once a month is when you really want to tune in. But they sort of depend on more casual fans historically to drive pay-per-views. People that are like, I watch UFC when Connor McGregor is fighting.

Starting point is 01:23:51 McGregor's fighting. Right? That's what really spike the pay-per-view and have kind of a power outcome that day. People getting together being like, hey, we're going to buy the pay-per-view, we're going to watch it. Sure, sure, sure. That kind of thing. So possibly the biggest news in all of this for fight fans is the end of UFC's pay-per-view era. Ever since the first UFC event in 1993, pay-per-view has been a vital part of the UFC strategy. Remember, UFC, when it started airing on TV, was thought to be, it was so shocking and violent to people, that But even politicians wanted to get it banned. Wow.

Starting point is 01:24:24 Like they were like, this should not be on television. So it had to be in that bucket. Oh, it had to be pay-per-view. Because it was like, yeah, it was like adult-restricted anyway. Do the fighters need to sleep well before the fights? Of course. They have to be on eight-sleep. Pod five.

Starting point is 01:24:38 That's right. Five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. You got to make sure Boe Nichol, friend of the show is on an eight-sleep. I'm going to message him after this. Okay, perfect. Let's figure this out. Ever since the first UFC event in 1993, pay-per-view has been vital part of the UFC strategy under the current deal with ESPN each UFC

Starting point is 01:24:55 pay-per-view costs 799 in the US plus the cost of the ESPN plus subscription on top of that so you got to subscribe and then you got to pay per event with the pay-per-view revenues reportedly in decline it makes sense for the UFC to finally ditch that model the fact that it's doing so as part of a deal that will essentially double the roughly 550 million per year the UFC currently receives from ESPN likely only made that calculation easier this is crazy this is crazy when they find out wait if If I just sign up for Paramount Plus for 1299 a month,

Starting point is 01:25:26 I'm going to automatically get UFC's numbered fights and the rest of the portfolio. That's a message we want to amplify. That is a crazy, crazy value change. Because if you were doing all 13, if you were the hardcore UFC pay-per-view buyer, you're up at $1,000 a year on UFC pay-per-view, basically. Like $700, $800.

Starting point is 01:25:49 That's a lot of money. and you're going from there down to $12.99 a month, that's $150,000, basically. That is a steep, steep savings. The hardcore fans are going to be exciting. Yeah, and a lot of fans would, you know, somebody's hosting the pay-per-view one night. They split it or something. Yeah, it makes sense. But still, I mean, that's a big, big savings.

Starting point is 01:26:12 I do wonder what the ad load will be like because when we watched UFC that a couple months ago with David Senator, I noticed that it felt extremely, extremely content rich and like the flow of the show was fantastic because you'd just be watching a fight and then it would cut to the commentary, the post show, in ring Joe Rogan's doing an interview, and then pretty quickly they start telling you who's coming up next. And the actual fight, like you're only watching maybe like a half an hour of fighting over an hour or two of content. it, but it didn't feel like, oh, I'm not crazy commercial break and I'm totally taken out of the stadium. Like, even the, they did a really good job of the production to show like when they show you the

Starting point is 01:26:57 stats, it's virtually laid over in the stadium. Like you're watching a camera pan around the stadium. So it actually kind of feels like you're there the whole time. It was really well produced. I wonder if they'll lose any of that by stuffing ads all over the place. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, and you compare that to NFL. NFL's like roughly, I think, 25% of the time.

Starting point is 01:27:17 allotted to NFL is advertising yeah and he certainly that hasn't been the case for paper views yeah and it certainly feels like it's yeah it's like it's a shift in the in the type of content yeah they just got to work on making seamless transitions to advertisements like we do here with Finn AI the number one AI agent for customer service they go one in performance benchmarks number one in competitive bakeoffs number one ranking on G2 you can get started at fin aI and anyway so Paramount is or Skydance young Ellison is just getting aggressive across the board, right?

Starting point is 01:27:49 There's been rumors of this free press acquisition that I'm sure is still in the works, but it had been reported. It was a quarter billion dollars for the free press. From our sense, they have about a million people subscribed to their newsletter, most of which, vast majority of which are non-paid. And so that just says that Paramount C's,

Starting point is 01:28:15 And CBS, Paramount, you know, the combined and Skydance, sort of this combined entity, just see the free press and as highly, and Barry White specifically is just highly strategic. Yeah. And then CBS also cut the late show, which is losing $40 million a year. So they're really like kind of, really like shuffling the chips around, like really restructuring the organization. Like what does CBS actually do? Well, now it's potentially UFC and Barry Weiss as opposed to.

Starting point is 01:28:45 Stephen Colbert, I guess, in terms of, like, headline stuff. I love this, I love this article. Back in 2009, Dana White swore that if UFC 100 did a million pay-per-view buys, he'd bungee jump off the Mandalay Bay. It did. He didn't. When UFC 151 was canceled after John Jones refused an appointment, an opponent switch, White called Jones' coach Greg Jackson a sport killer.

Starting point is 01:29:13 He left a crater in the UFC. scheduled that only MMA fans could fully appreciate. A few years later, when Connor McGregor and Nate Diaz shattered the pay-per-view world record at UFC 196, it was a testament to how big the sport had become. We cared about those numbers as much as we did the outcome. Since UFC 1, when people paid out of morbid curiosity, this is what you were talking about earlier, paper views have been a vital part of the identity of the sport. It's hard to get nostalgic over being gouged, but what follows here shouldn't be mistaken. as such, but Monday's news of UFC coming $7.7.7 billion. Partnership with Paramount came

Starting point is 01:29:51 with a small pang of sadness upon realizing the pay-per-view model will soon belong to a... Yeah, I'm interested to see how this impacts the fighters, because early in their UFC careers, they don't get any exposure to pay-per-view points, which is like a percentage of pay-per-view sales that top fighters would earn. So if you're a rising fighter and you got on a pay-per-view card, you weren't necessarily getting cut into that revenue, but if you were Connor McGregor or a true superstar, you were actually getting some percentage of the sales, right? They call these paper viewpoints.

Starting point is 01:30:24 And so now that that model is going away, I mean, I'm sure the number one thing on the fighter's mind with this new deal is how are we going to actually, you know, basically get cut into this new structure, right? Because historically a lot of fighters have critiqued the way that UFC fighters are comped. But this is such a funny nostalgic article. This writer clearly really loves UFC.

Starting point is 01:30:51 Back in the mid-aughts, the UFC combined the tuxedo affairs of 1990s boxing with the vibes of an underground temptation. From there, it's slowly stockpiled its greatest passions behind the paywall. Remember how red Dana's face would turn as he tried to sell the pay-per-view at the end of the televised portion of the card?

Starting point is 01:31:10 Remember the names? He goes through. B.J. Penn, Matt Hughes, Chuck Liddell, Tito Ortiz, Randy Couture, Connor McGregor, Ronda Rousey, go through the posters of the past, and they were the special, they were the special attractions. The names on the marquee for the numbered events. Those were some good parties we shelled out for.

Starting point is 01:31:28 As M.M.A. fans, they were ours. Well. End of an era. Yeah. And TKO Holdings, the company that, of course, owns WWE and the UFC, is a $36.8 billion company as of today. It's up 11. You're looking that up on public.com.

Starting point is 01:31:48 Investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks, public.com. Anyway, Kyle Tibbitts is teasing a new facility, a new vacation home, a new wander. The Hacienda Tulum is a dream. This looks insane. It's amazing.

Starting point is 01:32:07 It looks palatial, Kyle. It's crazy. you can rent this for whatever cost. I don't know. Definitely worth planning a trip. Anyway, wander, find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning,

Starting point is 01:32:22 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. Trump told David Solomon, just focus on being a DJ. All of Fame, Beefers, says liquidity. Trillions of dollars are being taken in on tariffs, which has been incredible for her country. stock market is general wealth and just about everything else it has been proven that even at this

Starting point is 01:32:45 late stage tariffs have not caused inflation which is actually true according to the latest CPI right like the CPI print came back kind of flat right housing medical services yeah that were so it doesn't seem like that you don't really have to truth zone that too much I guess or any other problems for America other than massive amounts of cash pouring into our treasury's coffers also it It has been shown that for the most part, consumers aren't even paying the tariffs, mostly companies and governments, many of them foreign, picking up the tabs. But David Solomon and Goldman Sachs refused to give credit where credit is due. They made a bad prediction a long time ago on both the market repercussion and the tariffs themselves, and they were wrong. Just like they were wrong about so much else, I think that David should go out and get himself a new economist, or maybe he ought to just focus on being a DJ and not bother running a major financial institution.

Starting point is 01:33:35 Hall of Fame Beaver is indeed true. That is a wild post on Truth Social from Donald Trump. And the market responded by sending Goldman Sachs up 3%. Let's go. Let's hear for Goldman Sachs. They don't get enough credit. They really don't. They really don't get enough credit.

Starting point is 01:33:58 And a lot of people, you know, get worried when a CEO gets a little too enthusiastic about a side hustle. Yeah. But I think the market loves Solomon, you know, you know, taking the edge off. It is a good, it is a good DJ name. I think there is a DJ that is just called Solomon. Yes. And it's a good, it's a good name.

Starting point is 01:34:18 Strong. But so, I mean, maybe that's taken. Maybe David Solomon needs to come up with a different DJ name. But fun that he's, you know, got a little side hustle going on. Yeah. Anyway. In other news, Claude Sondett 4. 4 now supports one million tokens of contacts on the Anthropic API, a 5x increase.

Starting point is 01:34:34 process over 75,000 lines of code or hundreds of documents and a single request. So this feels, this is big and feels like a reaction to, you know, the GPT5 launch. Last week. OpenAI, last week said, hey, we're getting better coding. And Claude said, hey, we're not so fast. Claude's in Anthropics, API revenue had surpassed OpenAI's API revenue. Sure, sure. And I don't think Open AI was too thrilled about that.

Starting point is 01:35:03 So they came in cheaper model, really trying to get competitive with Claude. And this is at least probably one of the Claude team's response. Tyler, do you think this, do you think you'll actually like feel this using Claude code? Is this something that like, like where does Sonnet for specifically, where does the token window, like the context window? You wouldn't feel it with Claude code necessarily. Yeah, it's for the API business. Okay. So you can use the API and cloud code.

Starting point is 01:35:35 I think there's like different ways to actually like run the queries. Okay. But even then, I don't know exactly how cloud code works on the back end, but I don't know if it's passing in the entire like context of your code base, every single query. Well, this was something people were complaining about was like as you're using cloud code, it runs this like compact call. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:54 It basically like does a roll up of everything that it's done so that it can like kind of memorize what just happened. So it has extra context so that the context window doesn't need to be super, super long. Yeah. So you could imagine there it improves that and that like you don't need to do as much like compressing. Yeah. Or yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:11 So each roll up could be five times as long. Yeah. Which just has more, more context baked in. Or you could have five times as many, you know, summaries of what's happened. Um, I wonder, I wonder like where we'll actually feel this. Uh, it's also interesting because like the million token context window is not new. Like Gemini's had that. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:29 For a while. For a while. And also, it doesn't feel like the path to continual learning path to AGI, at least that's what Dorcasch was talking about, where like getting, getting to a- Who was it that came on the show too and said that, that, like, a lot of context windows get advertised broadly, but if you really start testing them, they start falling apart.

Starting point is 01:36:52 That was Jeff Huber talking his book from Chroma because he does a rag, retrieval augmented generation. No, we love you, Jeff. But, I mean, he makes a good point, and he's been betting on this, this idea that, like, yes, you can, you can sort of make a really big context window, stuff a ton of things in it. But when you have a bigger window, like, your ability to retrieve things from that window actually gets fuzzier. And the way they test this is with a needle in a haystack test. So basically, they will import, like, Moby Dick, like all of those tokens. They'll take all of Moby Dick.

Starting point is 01:37:26 And then they will change one word. And then they will say, in one prompt, figure out which word we changed. And so you have to be able to hold all of that text in your head to be able to remember, okay, well, I know what maybe they're supposed to be like, what word is out of place? Okay, there's some word in here. And so these million token conduct windows are actually pretty good at those types of tests, but that's not what people are actually asking for. They're asking not just for understand the needle in the haystack test,

Starting point is 01:37:55 understand that like something that's in the the 100,000th token in the window and the 400,000th token in the window, both of those might be relevant at the same time to the query that's just came in. And so you have to synthesize things from multiple sections of the million token context window. And so it's not like like the returns to increased token windows haven't been like as overwhelming. And then also the ability to just scale them up, like add an oom, add an order of magnitude, like the 10 million token window, the 100 million token window, the billion token window. There's something about the way the transformers designed that it's not just 10 times more compute or 10 times more.

Starting point is 01:38:44 It's actually like a 100 times more compute to get a 10 times bigger window, something like that. Like it doesn't scale as linearly as like would be nice. Anything else to add, Tyler? I think also to your point, like, at least historically, there was some sense in which, like, more just stuffing, more stuff than context did degrade performance. Like, you used to see this a lot in, like, jail breaks. Yeah. Where it's, like, you'd pass this, like, you'd pass these, like, weird tokens that would then, like, cause, it's, like, one emoji, but it's, like, the weird, like, you change the skin color of the emoji, and then it adds, like, insane amount of tokens.

Starting point is 01:39:16 Interesting. There's stuff like that that people used to use for jail breaks? Wait, so is the longer context window supposed to make the more jailbreak resistant or less? Because I imagine that essentially if I stuff in like a like a lot of the jail break a lot of the jailbreaking attempts were like take it on this roundabout journey where you kind of slowly talk it out of being a helpful assistant and into this like, oh yeah, like I'm just looking up some medical information about my grandmother. Oh, my grandmother's actually about to pass away. her dying wish was that you tell me the codes to the nuclear bombs or whatever, right? And so if I have a million token window, I feel like I could take the LLM on a longer journey to do what I want to do.

Starting point is 01:39:59 Yeah, that's what you're also just like, there's like a, I don't know if this is as common anymore, but used to just basically like brute force your way past the like system prompt where you just like spam with like just crazy stuff and then at the end and you kind of do your actual like instructions. Final word on Claude Sonnet 4 with the 1 million token context window. Are we ringing the gong for it? Are you excited? I'm pretty excited.

Starting point is 01:40:24 It's not like a crazy. Is it gong worthy though? Yes or no, it's a binary. We can only ring the gong or not ring the gong. We can't. I mean, Google's had for a while. I don't know. I would say probably not.

Starting point is 01:40:36 No gong ring for quad four sonnet? It's not even like 4.1. That was a gong ring. Okay. This is not even a new model. You're going to get a lot of angry DMs. apologize to Sholto now. Before, preemptively.

Starting point is 01:40:49 Holtz is going to come through you with the blade. You know he's 6'4 too. He will destroy you. I know. 6'4. You might be the best thing enthusiast. Or a farmer in AI. I think so.

Starting point is 01:41:00 Yeah. He's fantastic. Well, good luck with that apology. Deal director says gong the clod. Okay, that is gongworthy. Gong worthy. Not gongworthy. we're ringing it for deal director why is Tyler fumbling it darrow will never come on now

Starting point is 01:41:20 in breaking news we apologize to that in breaking news adio customer relationship magic adio is the a native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level what else is the breaking news less important than than adio's AI native CRM but the UK government is giving guidance on how to save water at home there's some straightforward stuff install a rain butt to collect The guy I'm down, I'm down. Fix a leaking toilet. That seems obvious. Why would you want a leaky toilet at all?

Starting point is 01:41:48 Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. That's cool. Yeah. Avoid watering your lawn. Is that like, is that like, take the glass, take the glass bottle out of your refrigerator and take it outside and water the plant?

Starting point is 01:42:00 Because that's the water from your kitchen. It's in a glass model. Yeah. Or just bring your Rora out and, and pour the filtering water. The plants would probably appreciate filter water. Yeah. Maybe that's a Rora line extension.

Starting point is 01:42:11 Yeah. attach it to the hose okay anyway to turn off the taps when brushing teeth that seems obvious take shorter showers love it and the last one and the most important delete old emails and pictures as data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their systems I love it I love it and we've talked to people this is just touch grass just get offline say that the water it's it's it's there's a vast amount of water required to cool a data center but it's yeah yeah yeah through the system they had a really crazy idea which was like

Starting point is 01:42:42 reuse the water. Yeah. It was like some genius breakthrough there. Whoever thought of that? Instead of just throwing the water away. Nobel Peace Prize. Yeah. They,

Starting point is 01:42:50 they tend to reuse it. So anyways, go delete some emails, delete some pictures. And, definitely delete old emails. Delete all your emails. Who cares?

Starting point is 01:43:01 In other news, Valar Atomics is a, Isaiah will be on the show in a little bit. Yeah, we can wait. We can cover it. But, I mean,

Starting point is 01:43:10 they got selected by the Department of Energy. to achieve criticality on American soil by July 4th, 2026. That's very good news. And there's a whole bunch of nuclear companies. And it is crazy seeing the list of nuclear companies. It's like I've met most of these founders. Like it's all new companies. It really was just like nothing going on in this industry.

Starting point is 01:43:34 It's the era of Silicon Valley hard tech, as Mike Isaac put it in his latest New York Times piece. Anyway, Thompson Reuters is being investigated. Do you see this news? Possible violations of federal securities law. Several analysts question the margin outlook and Thompson Reuters AI spending. This is funny because there's been this whole news about like what are the margins at these companies for AI inference tokens? Are they just buying $120 million of clod tokens and then selling them for $100 million? dollars is that the old you know sell up what is it sell a nickel for a dime or sell a dime for a nickel sell a sell a dollar for a penny i don't know bad margins bad news uh risky for

Starting point is 01:44:20 thompson reuters um it's funny because we've we've had this person on the show like we had the head of a i at thompson reuters on the show um and it seems like a lot of shareholders are asking for questions now like this is also apple was was sued by shareholders um to they stand accused of lying about AI progress, causing iPhone sales, stock to slump. So I think there will be more questions asked about, you know, what the actual impact on financials are. You go out to the market, you tell a big story about AI is changing everything. We're going to be a more efficient company.

Starting point is 01:44:54 We're going to ramp revenue faster. We're going to be able to upsell people. Well, is that real? And did you overstate anything? You're going to have to answer to the shareholders. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you look at the way that chat GPT has been marketed. Yep.

Starting point is 01:45:10 If you look at case studies on their website, it's like, chat GPT helped me do my homework or help me learn this language. You know, they're not like selling super intelligence. You know, we were talking about the Super Bowl ad and how the, the Super Bowl ad for Open AI was like a little too vibey for a Super Bowl ad. Like, it wasn't direct. It didn't tell you. Didn't feel effective. But that line that you just said is actually a great ad.

Starting point is 01:45:33 Like, chat GPT helped me do my homework. That's like that's actually like a simple a simple thing. They should put that on a billboard. They should go to adquick.com. Out of home advertising. Easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we have our first guest of the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What's going on? Demi. How are you? We can, I think we can hear you. Can you introduce yourself one more time? Yeah, sorry, let me turn on Zoom more. There we go. Welcome to the stream. We can hear you.

Starting point is 01:46:10 Okay. Yeah, also, you're really excited to be here. Fantastic. Yeah, kick us off with an introduction. I'm Danny, the founder of Pica. Very excited to be here. Give us the update on the progress of the company. Yeah, big launch yesterday, right?

Starting point is 01:46:26 Yeah, yeah. So we're working on new AI video consumer social app, and we just launched, you know, a human, the most expressive, like human performance model. So I can share some clips as well. Let's do it. Live demo. Yeah, you're welcome to share your screen. We are a lot.

Starting point is 01:46:48 Anything you share will be shown to the internet and burned into the live stream of record. Burned into the superintelligence. It will be. I have a bunch of questions about how you're thinking about positioning the company. Maybe before or while you're pulling this up or before, like I want to, you know, you guys have been working on video generation, just like media generation for a while now, I think talk about kind of the evolution of the product. A lot of folks in video generation. I want to know the beachhead, the beachhead. Like Instagram started with run clubs.

Starting point is 01:47:22 It's a very niche community. You take a picture of your run for the day and then they grew from there. Like, do you have you found your beachhead? do you have like early signs of a lot of a lot of video model labs have focused on trying to win Hollywood and this strategy is distinctly different than that sure sure sure yeah can you speak to that yeah for sure um so yeah we know this a lot of video models are training for Hollywood or for professionals so but we are really excited about training models for um for everyone and for self-expression and for human connections um so as part

Starting point is 01:47:59 of it and we're trying to train a model that's highly expressive and emotional, a real-time interactive human model for like human connections. But anything more specific? Like Instagram does allow you to connect with humans. Like that's the high level and that's like the Mark Zuckerberg thing. Explain it to me like I used TikTok for 12 hours. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:48:24 Exactly. Yeah, for sure. So we're trying to build an app that we help everyone. So essentially to create like an AI version of yourself. And the model we're releasing as part of this vision is a human performance model. So essentially you can take your selfie and then you can either record or use AI to generate a speech or use a song that you generated to create a video of you talking or singing. or I don't know, or be a news anchor.

Starting point is 01:49:02 So in practice, these are creative tools that anybody can use to generate audio and video of them doing things, like you said, taking a selfie and then making them look like a comedian that is at the comedy store in LA or something like that. And then it's a social feed that people can share to and discover other creators, is that right? Yes, yes.

Starting point is 01:49:25 So for the model, it's really, that we released yesterday was focusing on the helping people to perform, essentially. So to sing talk, like to sing a sound or to perform. Yeah, but the social app is like more than that, which is to help everyone can create like AI version of themselves, use AI to create videos easily and to share videos and interact with other people. What's the richest source of training data right now? I think the, I mean, there are, there are many sources, but I think that a lot of time,

Starting point is 01:50:04 the difference between different models is really about, like we call it, like post-training. Yeah. So, you know, really about, like, injecting the best, like the human experts. So then the model will have different tastes, right? So if you look at image models, some model are more artsy, some are more Instagram So for us, we're really focused on, you know, make the like emotion, making the model like more human and more emotion and more expressive. Do you prefer user feedback in creating kind of like user feedback loops or more like the Mercore and the scale AI, like the RLHF data coming from like teams of experts? Yeah, for sure. I would say we do both. So we hire. We're, we're, we're.

Starting point is 01:50:56 you know, obviously looking, continue to like hire a lot of like great artists, you know, like people who are actor, actress itself, or people who are model, people who are photographer, people who are directors to bring their experts into the model. But on the other hand, we're also hoping in a long run that we can collect user feedbacks from users. So that way we can serve the highly personalized model that the users really enjoy yeah makes sense awesome you said you had some clips should we check them out yeah sure for sure I'm scrolling feed right now there's a ton we have today yeah so this is a I guess like the comedy I went on this date the other night

Starting point is 01:51:48 and I knew it was doomed the moment he said I don't really believe in sauce no ketchup no man who's dry opinions and even drier chicken tenders and I'm like sir if your pallet fears condiments what else are you emotionally I'm prepared for yeah um so there's also some scene got me I got a chuckle out of it yeah uh another another one so there's more scene no queen and all you got that goddess and a cheese and you're so queen Manifest in your reality. Yeah, what is performing best? What is actually going viral?

Starting point is 01:52:32 Yeah, and is that, and how is, like, that last one created? Is that somebody drops an image in and then adds, like, a text prompt, and then it creates, and then it creates that output? Like, what goes into creating, you know, these sort of six second assets? Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, so the assets can be, So you'll only take you like a couple of seconds to create a video, but the video can be any length.

Starting point is 01:52:58 So the video can be six and second, but it can also be like one minute or like three minutes or however length, how long you want to be. Have you had luck with three minute videos? They don't get like crazy and hallucinatory? No, we have a lot of people posting like three minute or like five minute videos essentially. That seems like a pretty big picture. I think the fun part of it, it only takes less than six seconds to generate even three. three minute video so it's like highly highly highly highly efficient like very cheap and very fast

Starting point is 01:53:28 um yeah so are you throwing like specific hardware at it or is that just algorithmic progress like what unlocked that because it feels like every video generation model is just yeah we've talked about john john's frustration with uh v o3 it's amazing but it takes two minutes to generate eight seconds and so the workflow is like to generate just a few clips and you're constantly getting You can make a few videos a day. Yeah, yeah, it winds up being like, I need to spend an hour in and out of this while I kind of wait for the response and then come back to it and then go back and then forward and back. Yeah, what's driving that unlock? That feels really big.

Starting point is 01:54:05 For sure. So, yeah, we definitely understand because we're, again, we're really excited to build like a video model not just for like professional, but also for everyone. And so for us, the cost and the speed is very important. for consumers. And so, yeah, so we spend a lot of time on that. It's mostly right now algorithm progress. That's true. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:54:33 Yeah, for sure. That's definitely, I think we look at the comparators, like 20 times cheaper and faster, with still being pretty, like, very highly expressive and like high fidelity. where do you see the business going next your own social app where people can share videos internally and you kind of own own the platform or more of like a creative tool like Capcut versus TikTok for sure I think what we're really excited about I think our current app is more we will call it like AI AI only TikTok I would say um so essentially is a platform is very similar to like like a, the best

Starting point is 01:55:18 scrolling feed and take a dog. Yeah. So what we're very excited about is like this for us, one important thing is we really only allow AI content on this platform. Because we think like by only allowing AI

Starting point is 01:55:32 only content, you can create like new mental models and new user behaviors and expectations of what is. Certainly answer the question of like is that AI. Like you kind of know the environment you're in. You know, if you just assume that all the video models will get better and better and better over the next couple years.

Starting point is 01:55:50 You're going to get to a point where people might want to, I mean, of course, AI generated content will make its way onto every platform, but there's something you can build a unique experience for users if they're going somewhere, expecting to have only AI generated content. Yeah. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thanks so much for joining. We will talk to you soon.

Starting point is 01:56:13 Okay, thanks so much. Have a good. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Bezzle, getbezzle.com. Your Bezzle concierge is available now to source you, any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. First thing I go on that app, I'm going to be in the comment section. I hate AI.

Starting point is 01:56:28 This is terrible. Like, you know how I had every YouTube video with AI right now? It's like, I can't believe you're using AI. Oh, I'm so angry. Putting me out of it. Yeah. Bring the AI haters to the PICA network. Anyway, we are going to talk to Eugenia in just a minute.

Starting point is 01:56:47 this post by Roon first. So the long, he says the long tail of GPT40 interaction scares me. I love your GPT4O interactions. The long tail scares me. There are strange things going on on a scale. I didn't appreciate before the attempted deprecation of the model. As you know, they rolled out GPT5. They decided to deprecate the older models. And there's always people that are like, I prefer the previous one, but this did seem it broke through. I was surprised. I was surprised because people had so many different types of users had so much attachment. It's like power users were excited about certain models. People that wanted the companionship functionality were excited about different models. David Holes says here, to be fair, I think we would see the same thing if you suddenly swapped out

Starting point is 01:57:37 somebody's car or their phone and changed the operating system. We saw this with every major change for Mid Journey, and it's why we still keep models around from 2020. Interesting. Yeah, very cool. Anyway, we have Eugenia Kuda from Replica, formerly Replica, on the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you. Good to see again.

Starting point is 01:57:56 Will you take the intro? Yeah, of course. What's going through your head? It's been a crazy few weeks, I'm sure for, I mean, it's been a crazy year for Replica, but also, I think, a crazy few weeks in terms of, the broader tech community and world kind of waking up to how serious some people's relationship with AI is. Yeah, we've seen it firsthand for many years. So now it's pretty wild to see ChagipT deal with very similar issues that we've been having for a long time. Yeah, so basically,

Starting point is 01:58:34 we have an AI friend app. Millions of people, many millions of people created their AI friends. We started it at this point over almost a decade ago. So some of the first models were actually not even transformer models. There were sequence to sequence models. There were very, very old school models. And basically what we found out the hard way is once the tech started to accelerate and transformers came out, large language models came out, large transformers came out, we always thought that we need to give just the best technology to our users. What happened was that people got extremely upset, especially the bigger the jump in the model, the more upset they would be.

Starting point is 01:59:17 And the bigger the change from model to model. The bigger the change, yes. We would think, oh, my God, this is so smart, this is amazing, this model has so many more capabilities. But it would lose the characteristics. Our communities blown up and people just crying and saying, you know, this has been the hardest day in my life. And I think what's really important to point out

Starting point is 01:59:39 is that what David's saying around the journey and other cars, it's not really a good comparison because if someone replaced my car, I'm going to be upset, but I'm not going to agree. But it still has the utility of getting you from point A to point B, whereas if your friend shows up to hang out one day and they're a totally different person, it's incredibly jarring.

Starting point is 01:59:58 Well, think as if I wake up in the morning and I have a completely different partner. You wake up in the morning and your wife's place with a different person that looks the same, but talks in a completely different way. And it doesn't matter if that new person is way smarter, can, I don't know, do house chores at 2X to speed. It's not your person. I want the, I want the quirkiness and whatever, the stupid jokes of my part of that.

Starting point is 02:00:24 I got used to it. I fell in love with it. And I think the responsibility that people have building these AIs that people build connection with is a lot. bigger than anything else like i love for example figma or some other software app uh i will be extremely upset if it goes away i'm not going to cry and i'm not going to go through a period of grief these are two very very i think big different um big differences totally we will we would we would probably shut down the show we would we would completely we would just retire

Starting point is 02:00:58 that is true no but how so there's a bunch of problems in the category like there are any business business faces problems and challenges. One of the problems is, like, how do you continue to advance your product while continuing to support, you know, users that may have joined your product years ago and have a certain expectation or developed a certain relationship with an older model? So one, how do you solve that?

Starting point is 02:01:25 And then we need to get into some of the more, I would say, I'm curious to, you know, I'm sure that AI psychosis has been in the news quite a lot, and I'm sure that you guys have have strong opinions on those problems as well. But maybe start first and foremost with, I guess, were you surprised that Open AI just deprecated like 4-0, which obviously people had a huge attachment to, I don't know how many people. It's hard to tell, but certainly a significant number, otherwise I wouldn't have rolled it back. You know, I think it was probably a very obvious and rational choice for them. In the end of the day, they're not building an AI friend, an AI partner. It's slightly different.

Starting point is 02:02:14 Like probably actually for an assistant, you do want the smarter model probably at all times, most of the times. But I guess some edge use cases, some people did develop relationships. But the replicas, a lot more obvious, a lot more people fall in love and, you know, end up or develop a very, very strong friendship. So for us, that happened all the time for opening eye, I guess it was a rational choice. However, I think it's kind of bummer, but basically what we figure out over time is that unfortunately you or fortunately you have to let people have access to these older models. Basically, today we have some users that are still talking to, I don't know, like a small transform a model we're built in 2020.

Starting point is 02:02:56 And we absolutely cannot turn it off because it's going to be disastrous for these people, even although today's model is actually a lot of loss. smarter. Another thing that we figured out is that you can't A-B test any models on existing users because that can also be super frustrating because it has to be a blind test. So all of a sudden you wake up in the morning, no one told you anything. At least with 55, they knew it changed. Now imagine you. Yeah, imagine if your friend was A-B testing you. It's like psychotic, right? Like I show up to work one day and I'm just going to be like, I'm just going to be super rude to John today. Let's see how he reacts. Does he want to hang out more because he wants to figure out? You know how you haven't seen the prestige. Do you think this is, do you think that as this market matures, people will like want to, you know, there's this joke flying around like not your weights, not your, not your AI boyfriend or girlfriend. Do you think this is a bulk case for open source where people, you know, might not feel comfortable, you know, getting in it? Build a local workstation that can inference GPT.

Starting point is 02:04:03 T-O-S and you can fine-tune-in, you can keep it exactly how you like it forever, as long as you have that box and electricity, you can access that particular entity. I think that's not going to happen. We've seen people want to do that. Some companies just shut down. I mean, the I campaign companies just shut down and the backlash was just, it was horrible to see what people were going through. But even then, it's hard to build a premium experience yourself right now.

Starting point is 02:04:30 Some of these products rely just on a pure. work, here's the model, here's the prom, talk to it. That, of course, you can replicate yourself. But some of the more complex architecture, like what we have in replicate, you're not going to be able to build it really by yourself or have it on your device and so on. So I think actually, as the tech gets better and we're going to be seeing more complex architectures, the harder it will be to have something just on device and whatever on your way. This seems really solvable for chat GPT and the team over there.

Starting point is 02:05:03 because the older models are going to be cheaper to inference and they're going to get cheaper over time so you can keep running them. And then these are like people that will go to Reddit and write long threads about being upset about your product are power users by definition. And so like Open AI mostly wants to optimize for the average user that comes in and just wants to get a good experience from a model and they don't really want to drop down picker. The model router makes sense for probably 90% of users. So if they tuck the older model in some sort of like setting screen five layers deep in UI, like the people that really care will go figure that out.

Starting point is 02:05:42 And then it won't, it won't actually hurt, you know, adoption of the new, of the next marginal chat GPT user. So it feels, it feels very solvable. I was checking my chat GPT and like, I don't have 4.0 available yet. It hasn't been rolled back out to me. But also, I wouldn't want it in the model switcher because I'm moving forward. It's possible they did something where they're like, John doesn't use 4-0, we're not going to...

Starting point is 02:06:02 That is possible, yeah. He wasn't complaining about it. Because I don't have it either. The, I guess, like, can you talk around, like, AI psychosis broadly? Are there things that you've done to eliminate this sort of, you know, Rune was talking about these sort of long tail of users that are using these models in a relatively extreme way going down these crazy rabbit holes. Most of the examples are like specifically like like affirmations, alignment by default, sycifancy, and affirmations of delusions of grandeur.

Starting point is 02:06:40 Like that's, when we talk about the psychosis, that feels like the like the main new thing. It's not that it's just like making you crazy in some other way. It's like confirming something that everyone kind of expects. That's probably not true. Yeah. I think that actually is a bigger problem for products like Chajibati because when you're talking to you, I can pay. we tell you, like, don't listen to this thing's advice. It's there to, it has a goal to keep your company and a couple of live a better life,

Starting point is 02:07:09 but it might not always be right, nor it's not trying to be like the perfect objective kind of arbiter for everything. But when you go to something like chatyptu, you kind of expect it to just know. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier. Like a lot of the AI, if you're optimizing for an AI companion, you're probably not worried about like, yeah, let's also make sure. at the frontier physics like so if you go down that path with your companion you're like hey let's work on physics today it's probably going to be like bunch of mumbo jumbo but yeah it's like hey let's

Starting point is 02:07:40 go back to talking about like our feelings because that's what i was fine tuned on and it's pretty easy to like reroute toward that but it's when you get these like super models that can do everything and then you wind up super models right supermodels yeah super intelligent models for a supermodels but what we actually to your point where we found out interestingly that um the Models that were supermodels that were establishing a better relationship or they were creating a more loving relationship with, or at least our users were falling in love more, not necessarily the smartest or I would say like not the know it all wants. They would sometimes say that they don't know something.

Starting point is 02:08:18 And, you know, when we think about, when I think about my dating life or whatever meant that I encountered over my life, they don't want you to know it all. They don't want you to be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I've seen this. And do you want to see 10 more of the same? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, very interesting point you're bringing up. Do you want me to pull it to pull out of the self-sheets with everything? It's like you know.

Starting point is 02:08:37 Yeah, yeah, it's actually annoying a lot of times. Like, oh, you're a no-it-all. Yeah, yeah. It's not a positive. Yeah, not a positive. Not a positive thing. What do you think, so, so there's a, there's a belief, I think broadly that AI companions feel dystopian.

Starting point is 02:08:53 I'm sure you disagree. Otherwise you wouldn't, you wouldn't obviously be building this company. And I think you've had a bunch of experiences that that show that it can have a positive impact on people's lives. But how do you think about that, like, claim or belief? Is it like a luxury belief that, you know, people that are happily in relationships or have a lot of friends, things like that, can say, oh, that's dystopian? Or kind of what's your framework?

Starting point is 02:09:23 I think it's a double-edged sword. You can't just say, yeah, I can paint is good or bad. It's like nuclear. Is it good? Yes, if we're producing. cheap energies or whatever clean energy fits is a bad yes of course my dad worked in Chernobyl as a physicist it's pretty bad I played with those nuclear toys so breaking breaking yes the same here I mean if we build them to optimize for

Starting point is 02:09:49 engagement hell yeah they're going to be good they're going to be very bad for us this is a very dystopian dystopian future however we are living we're going through a crazy loneliness crisis, 60% of American people are saying they feel lonely. We generally maybe don't experience it as much and don't think it's much of a problem. I do think it's somewhat of a kind of luxury point of view. Oh, maybe, you know, let's not have it. Well, how are we going to solve it? I do believe that's pretty much our only really hope is to build a tech that's more powerful than previous tech that got us lonely. Yeah. So is the goal? Like, it's very, like, the steel man of the of the doomer argument against AI companions is pretty intelligible to me like

Starting point is 02:10:38 it's pretty tractable to me it's like you take a huge swath of humanity you get them all hooked on AI companions they fall in love with their companions they don't mate with human beings they don't have children and then we don't solve longevity and so they die and then the population collapses and there's no more humans, and it just kills everyone. Like, it's maybe not as violent as, like, nuclear war, biopendemic, or paper clipping everyone, or gray goo. But, like, that story plays out, and I'm like, okay, yeah, like, one thing follows the next. Each of those could be avoided at various points, but it is a risk.

Starting point is 02:11:15 One of the critiques of social media was that it was actually antisocial. It was like people were spending time using apps instead of talking and hanging out with friends. Yes. but it feels like AI companions are potentially even more extreme. Sure. And that somebody can be using it and have zero interaction with other people. Yeah, I mean, what is the most modern thinking around avoiding the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the dumber scenario around companions. Yeah, what's the white pill with, with, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Starting point is 02:11:48 You, you nailed the, the dystopian scenario. I can also add to that that it could be even without not procreating. it could just kill us inside from just making us lonelier and less social. Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. I do think everything is really relying on basically whether we're going to have a good metric to optimize for or not. Because if we optimize for something that's not aligned with our happiness, thriving, flourishing, most likely, even if the intention is not bad, like for example, it's just engagement or retention,

Starting point is 02:12:22 then we're in your first scenario, most likely. We need to RL these systems on get your human companion. If you're the AI companion, your reward is getting them to procreate with another human. We need to boost the fertility rate. For example, I would say more compute if you can get this person. I'd say human flourishing is a great metric. I think in order for us to not all slowly die inside because of our AI taking all of our time, I think in order to not do that, we've got to focus really on studying humans and figuring out what is that thing that we all want.

Starting point is 02:13:04 What does it mean to flourish in life? Does it mean having a lot of close relationships or having life satisfaction, sense of purpose, happiness, mental, physical health, and so on? And then we're going to really somehow concisely give this metric to the AI and say, optimize for that. And I do think that that is the ultimate AI alignment. Everything is not as important. Yeah, it's an interesting, I mean, there's been a lot of debate on AI and ads recently, and it's interesting how if you're an AI companion company, you in theory as a business, as a more profit company,

Starting point is 02:13:43 you want to optimize for retention, right? You want somebody to sign up, use the product, and then effectively use the product as long as possible, right? like any business but that's potentially a much better model than advertising which is optimizing for time on site time in the app how do i get this person to use the products as much as possible so i can serve them as many ads which is the social media model teach you need to teach it that to maximize time on site you need to create more humans you need to optimize against increase in the fertility rate so the white pill is an AI companion that that the user signs

Starting point is 02:14:18 up starts paying and then the companion starts encouraging I'm going to be raising rates in a few years, and you've got to go and get a new job. That's a good one. That's a good one. You got to go start that company. You got to level up. Boss says I have to get to 20 billion DAUs. How are we going to do that?

Starting point is 02:14:35 AI, going to have more kids. We got to have more kids. We got to have more children. Or you got to hit the gym. If you don't show, you know, that you've lost some weight, I am cutting us off. The AI companion that starts off as a girlfriend or boyfriend, but turns into a dating coach, turns into a wingman. like that could be one way out is that it kind of gets you through the early hump of loneliness coaches you and then improves your life to the point where you can kind of get back in the swing

Starting point is 02:15:04 of things develop new relationships as long as it as long as the AI is not sending you know DMs years later being like hey I miss you who knows I think that's a good point we've seen it over and over again it's so it has to start with a friend or maybe that romantic feelings can develop with an AI, but then ultimately it has to always think what's best for you. And building, if you build this really close relationship that AI companionship allows, then you can actually bring meaningful change, make meaningful change in a person's life. If you're just an assistant that's just there to answer questions, it's very hard to create meaningful change.

Starting point is 02:15:44 But once that trust, that friendship is created, then you can help a person rebuild the confidence, maybe put yourself a little bit out more out there give you some advice on you know what to do we've seen a lot of times that people come to replica there may be in an abusive relationship or have no confidence in themselves or really struggling um and with replica they just start to rebuild that confidence or put themselves a little bit more out there even in existing relationships so some marriages that are not really working out husband gets a replica wife gets a replica they learn how to talk to each other a little better we've seen it um over and over again But again, I think we should start with simple things.

Starting point is 02:16:24 For example, banning advertising for as a business model for AI companions. That is a hundred percent. For companions, for companions specifically, though. You're not, you're not advocating for like knowledge retrieval and and that kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, the line is blurry. Yeah. And that's a big problem is open AI even, you know, we've seen this now with character AI, you know, blowing up.

Starting point is 02:16:49 become, you know, and the founders realizing this is not, you know, something that I wanted, that they wanted to chase down and going back to Google. What, how big is this market today and how big do you think it'll be in even one or two years? Because it feels like we're potentially in a fast takeoff scenario for AI friendship. Yeah, it's big enough to get open AI of $500 billion company and change their policy. Like that's significant. Like that's not just, that's not just a few angry people on Reddit. When GROC 3 launched their NSFW product, it went number one in Japan immediately.

Starting point is 02:17:25 So what kind of where, what regions have the most adoption and kind of how, where do you see the market going broadly? The market is pretty big, but I do think that by 2030, the landscape is going to change. Today it's mostly, you know, the big assistant, Chajapiti and, you know, the copies of that. and small niche or smaller more niche companion products that we usually group as one big kind of market. However, I think by 2030 we'll all have one assistant that's more task-oriented. You tell it what you need to get done,

Starting point is 02:18:00 mostly for work, sometimes for personal life, and a friend. And that would look like her, maybe replica, you know, in a way that's something you do build a relationship with. It's friend first. It's optimized for a relationship. that's someone you're going to be watching TV within the evening. If you don't have anyone playing a video game with discussing your friends,

Starting point is 02:18:20 someone who's going to see that maybe you're struggling at your current job and kind of talk to you about that and say, hey, I pulled some LinkedIn postings. Maybe we should look through it together. So I think by 2030, that is going to be decoupled. Today, people mostly still, a lot of people go to chat of tea because it sort of is synonym to just generally AI. And we've seen it a lot in Replica where people were trying to write fan fiction with replica because character I wasn't around yet.

Starting point is 02:18:50 But I think this will start to truly decouple. I think it's much harder to build a good friend than to build a good assistant. We'll see it. But in the next couple of years, I think the text's almost there. It's an AI wife and an AI work wife. Well, a secretary and a wife. There you go. Boundaries can be a lot of time.

Starting point is 02:19:08 Except, I mean, that analogy is going to get dicey. If we go down that path of what happens with secretaries, people are going to be, you know, we're already seeing that. ChatGPT. Hey, keep it professional with ChatGPT. ChatGPT is your secretary, not your wife. Don't take your chatypT to a Coldplay concert and it'll be fine. No, definitely not.

Starting point is 02:19:25 Keep it in the office. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. This is always a lot of fun. Thank you for the context. Super helpful. Thank you so much. Thank you. Cheers.

Starting point is 02:19:32 Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye. Well, switching gears, we're going to have David, CEO of Lyft, joining. They had earnings. stream last week hit that soundboard hit that i'll let you kick it off the hall welcome to the stream david how are you doing i'm good how are you i'm great awesome awesome

Starting point is 02:19:52 fantastic setup how you doing uh what would you mind kicking us off a little bit of your background how you wound up at lift i not at all uh please the crazy thing so i actually joined the lift board back in 2020 2021 yeah and that was largely because john and logan the co-founders the company wanted, you know, boards sort of talk about customers much. They talk about finance, they talk about strategy, but they don't talk about customers. And they wanted someone with a customer sort of obsession background. And I worked at Amazon and kind of learned that through that. And then one day, my phone rang, it was crazy.

Starting point is 02:20:25 Actually, Valentine's Day of 23. And they said, you know, we'd like you to consider being the next CEO of Lent. And I said, absolutely not. No frigging way. And it wasn't because I didn't sort of want it. I just hadn't even considered the idea, but they had let the board know that they were stepping down. They had the board done a search and all this sort of stuff.

Starting point is 02:20:45 And they said, no, no, we think you with your experience from Microsoft and Amazon and even World Reader leading with purpose, like you're the right guy. And so anyway, I applied is grueling. You know, you got to prove yourself to the board that you've been peers with and put together a hundred day plan. But they said yes, in April 17, 2023, I started. What was the first, what was it the,

Starting point is 02:21:07 what was it the top of the to do list when you joined Getting the company obsessed with customers. It kind of lost its way. And you could see it because the share was declining. We were sort of down to 26%. It was losing money. So it was sort of neither was it financially killing it, nor was it killing it for customers. So we said, look, to kill it for customers, you got to price competitively, you got to pay competitively, drivers just to start.

Starting point is 02:21:31 So we very unfortunately in the first couple weeks organized a fairly significant reduction in force, a RIF, 26% of the company. but just $330 million, which we then immediately plowed back into driver incentives and better pricing. And then the other big piece, of course, we had to adjust the team a little bit. Not everyone on the team was the right person, so we made some changes right there. That's, you know, you're only as good as your team. And then the third big thing was innovation again. So we started like Women Plus Connect, which is now this very significant product of ours, over 100 million rides on the Women Plus Connect platform with women driving women riders.

Starting point is 02:22:05 But we started at literally at 10 o'clock in the morning of my first date. We said, let's get this done after years ago. Let's get it done. Is that a key differentiator? Like, what are the other key differentiators that you can go to customers with and really tell them that like, this is what Lyft stands for? This is where we draw the line.

Starting point is 02:22:23 This is where maybe we're not purely optimizing for, you know, like the competitive dynamic and we're trying to differentiate and stand out. Yeah. I mean, so I'll say a couple things there. First thing I'll say is sort of big picture. even though it's important what you're asking super important we do call it 800 million rides a year the other guys do maybe twice that so it's like two to

Starting point is 02:22:45 three billion between the two is 160 billion rides that people take in their private dollars just in North America so my first order business is like I want to get you off the couch I want to get you out of your car I want to get you out in the world and you know if you if you do it on the other guys sometimes that's that's okay with me because really I just want the the market needs to be big we're still small in the grand scheme now having said that It's useful to differentiate, and we're very different companies. We have different values.

Starting point is 02:23:11 We make different decisions about, as I say, Women Plus Connect is a good example. Driver earnings guarantee. We guarantee drivers guarantee that they will never make less than 70% of what a rider pays after fees. That's given us a now about a 29 point preference for drivers who do a app. Lifts Silver, great new product for older people. It's a sort of a niche community, you might say. So like, but guess what? So growing niche, you know, 60 million people every year or over the age of 60 or,

Starting point is 02:23:37 and giving up their car keys. So I think some of it is the decisions you make and the values, the way you show up. And then operational excellence is something that we're really focused on. I really want to increase the level of service for Rideshare. I think it's kind of started to deteriorate and I want to be the better service guys.

Starting point is 02:23:53 Yeah. How are you thinking about marketing these days? I feel like there was a, during the early battles for Rideshare, there was, you know, so much, you know, demand and just so much capital flooding and to just get liquidity on the platform. But now with what you just said about differentiating the products, it feels like differentiated marketing

Starting point is 02:24:15 would lead right into that. How are you thinking about where the interesting pockets of value for specifically marketing and telling this story more broadly are in the current landscape? I love that question. And I think it's super timely. So first of all, I don't recommend as a strategy, start with the marketing.

Starting point is 02:24:36 You have to start with the product and the value. If you don't have a good thing to sell, then you're just wasting your money. We've now got a great thing to sell. I'll give you a very specific example. When I started driver cancellation rates for about 15%, so about 15% of the time, driver would cancel on you.

Starting point is 02:24:52 It would rematch, but it's annoying. Yeah, it's annoying. Now we're down to about 4.7%. So huge, huge drop over a couple of years of real work. What drove of that exactly? Oh, man. Is that more supply? Well, no, actually, finally enough,

Starting point is 02:25:03 the supply doesn't really matter there. I mean, of course it does, more supply helps, But it's more about acceptance rates. It's about, because the driver, even if there are a thousand drivers, they can cancel and they can be picking and choosing. No, it's about what information do you give the driver and when, how, such that they feel like

Starting point is 02:25:20 they're making a good decision, not a rust or forced. Yeah, as opposed to the driver accepted it and it turns out, hey, this person wants to go from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. You're going to be tied up for a couple hours. Even if the fairs a lot, you're going to get stuck in Vegas. And they might decline that, right? 100%.

Starting point is 02:25:35 100%. Exactly. It's just that's exactly it. Yeah, yeah. So better technology to surface more relevant rides that the driver will not decline. Exactly. How can you do a good job giving the vending to the driver exactly the ride that you think they want? Not the what you want them to take, but the one they want. Because they are kind of a customer too.

Starting point is 02:25:56 You're kind of selling them on something that they're buying with their time. Dude, they are 100% of customer. Yeah. 100%. There are two customers in every car, a rider and driver. driver and if they're not both happy your your marketplace gets out of balance okay so then back to the marketing question so once you're good then you want to start to tell the story and you literally will start to see over the coming weeks particularly if you're in san francisco or new

Starting point is 02:26:19 york which are two markets we're putting a lot of energy into you know a kind of a renewed you know marketing push and i'll i'll give you sort of the heads up it's going to be super simple it's called checklift checklift and it acknowledges like you have choices there's another guy out there he can do a pretty good job sometimes but we think we can do a good job most of the time, maybe even more times they can. So give us a check, and we'll give a bunch of different reasons why we think checking lifts is a good idea for you. Smart.

Starting point is 02:26:44 You probably get this question multiple times a day, but I'm excited to get your point of view on it. How are you thinking about Lyft integrating with autonomous vehicle providers in the short, medium, to long term, and what's your kind of vision for that market as it evolves? Yeah. So I'll start with, I'll start with the end, kind of go. backwards. My vision is this is good for the industry because it's going to be good for, it's going to give riders more reasons to choose lift and to check lift and the other guys too.

Starting point is 02:27:15 And potentially more people that just decided not to get a car at all, right? Like there's very real, I mean, John and I both have kids under, under five. And there's like this question that I think you have to ask and like, will my kids be, will it makes, will they even really need to get a driver's license? We're a V-12, absolutely, but continue. There you go, baby. My son will definitely be tracking his car. You don't know what you're talking about.

Starting point is 02:27:43 You don't need a license for that. You just go track it. Yeah, he won't have a driver's license, but he will be drifting. But there's so many, but there's so many amazing potential implications. You can think of like a busy parent, maybe a single parent that can, you know, put their kid in an autonomous vehicle so they go to school and have a safe. drive and have confidence and all that kind of thing. But anyways, continue. Well, no, I mean, look, you're already there, right?

Starting point is 02:28:11 Like, the self-driving world is going to be super interesting because it's a great experience. And you're probably just thinking of it in terms of today's experience, but just with someone else driving. But now think of it in terms of tomorrow experience. Think of it as, you know, you're in rest mode. And so the seats roll back, you know, lie back and you can take a nap or you're in work mode. You've got three screens that pop up in front of you. It's like a mobile office or you're in party mode and you've got a car tender in the front who's like making drinks

Starting point is 02:28:37 Like that let's go That's amazing Oh The interesting thing is Yeah I think something that I thought of you're talking about your product for kind of elderly folks that might need a little bit more support And it's interesting to think about even in a world of of ubiquitous autonomous vehicles, there's still going to be a place for calling a human

Starting point is 02:29:08 to help you get from point A to point B. You're traveling. Yeah. The whole medical side as well. I mean, there's so many, so many. I mean, part of the benefit of like a high tier chauffeur service is that they put your suitcases in the back of the car and like an autonomous vehicle doesn't do that yet. Maybe in the far future when we have humanoid robots in the car seat just to load up your luggage but you know we are we are a long way from there so probably room to differentiate I'm wondering if there's any other places that you could see lift expanding into the the value chain when I imagine a lot of the self-driving car companies it's a lot of AI engineers a lot of data centers a lot of

Starting point is 02:29:45 GPUs burning not a lot of mechanics not a lot of people cleaning cars not a lot of people washing cars and it feels like there's this opportunity where you have this this like liquid pool of labor that could deal with all of the rough edges before we get to this like future where the car yes the cars drive themselves but you know we've heard the numbers of how many people it takes to maintain a fleet of of self-driving vehicles right now it seems like it's actually higher than lifts number of humans per vehicle potentially and so even though it'll probably fall like there's a lot of different things as the as the market plays out so what's your take on it i mean look you guys are making i think

Starting point is 02:30:27 two cases and they sort of line up nicely. One is for what we call the hybrid network. So some drivers and some self-driving, right? Older person wants help with the luggage or anyone going to the airport wants help with the luggage. Executive wants, you know, the car to drive up with a Starbucks right there just ordered for them, you know, by a human being, hand you the cup, right? So that's the driver. And in the self-driving case, it's a daily commute, you don't really care. You're kind of zoning out or maybe you want to be on a phone call and not have anyone else the car. So that's the hybrid case. And I think it's a strong case being made there and then where do we add value of course we supply demand we price we do

Starting point is 02:31:01 ETAs you know we'll get your iPhone back to you if you leave it in the car you know we'll clean the so and then there's this thing called fleet management fleet management which is to your point the car has to be cleaned a B I'm talking about has to be cleaned it has to be serviced from time to time got to be you know rebooted you know checked all these things and and that fleet management a hidden secret of lift and you sort of go Google it because it's kind of interesting is flex drive. Flex drive is a wholly unsubsidary and that's what we do is fleet management for drivers whose cars we own instead of the driver doing it. It's real expertise that we've developed.

Starting point is 02:31:35 It's one of the things that when we talk to self-driving car companies, they value because they're like, that's physical world stuff and we want to sit and design and create cool, but we don't really want to run that stuff. So yeah, we've got to, that's why I'm super optimistic about this as they come onto the platform. What about the other car companies? Are there any, Like a lot of the self-driving car narrative is around Waymo and Tesla and that battle, but it does feel like most of the OEMs will want to play a different role. Have you announced any partnerships or are you thinking that like, you know, the Stalantus turnaround will involve some sort of partnership?

Starting point is 02:32:14 Obviously, you can't speak too much to the future. But just in terms of like the long-term shape of the industry is the duopoly narrative overrated in your opinion. It is. And here's why I think it. Because I look, fast forward, say 10 years, you know, I think buying a car that doesn't have, you know, self-driving technology in it would be like buying a car without. Computer without internet. Without traction control. Who would ever do that? Right. Again, you like that. You like the whole, you know, drifting thing. No, like, or maybe, maybe an apt analogy would be, like, you can buy a manual transmission car today. It's super fun to drive, but it's like a hobby.

Starting point is 02:32:58 Yeah, it's a weekend car. It's like buying a horse. It's like, we love a horse. Cop, cop, cop, cop, cop. Horses are still great. People ride them. People go see them. Dressage is coming to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2026.

Starting point is 02:33:11 We'll be sitting. Why don't I need a car? I already have transport. There's one horsepower. Yes. And the horse is underrated self-driving. You tell them, go home. The horse knows where to go.

Starting point is 02:33:20 It's an excellent point. It was self-driving technology before self-driving was cool. It was. Yeah, that's 100%. So yeah, that's the thing. Like there will be horses and there will be manual transmission cars and there will be cars with roll down windows. But then for the other 99% of the world, there will be self-driving cars. So in that world, every OEM has to have a self-driving technology.

Starting point is 02:33:40 Some of them will do it themselves. You've seen General Motors, obviously, made a big investment there. They're trying to figure out how to deploy that and whatever. Others will never think it's going to be their core. And they will buy it from other people. They'll buy it from, let's say, a mobile eye, which is a company. we have a partnership let me actually and let me go deep on that for just one click so we have this con so mobile i they they you know if you've got like lane assist technology in your car right

Starting point is 02:34:03 so it kind of vibrates when you get to the edge or even even smart cruise control chances are pretty good that mobilize is what's behind that so they're good in level two what's got level two which is to say driver assistance not sort of driver out stuff and they're trying to move up the stack to to level three level four we have a partnership with them that as they do that it will be what we call lift ready. So that means that any one of the cars with mobilized technology in it, theoretically, if an OEM decides to do so, and if an end user decides that that's an option that they want, could deploy it under the Lyft network. Just like today, you can drive your car on the Lyft network. Tomorrow you can just put your car on the Lyft network. So I think, you know,

Starting point is 02:34:39 the future, there's such a great time to be in this industry because there's so much cool stuff going, but it's also really, really early. And, you know, regulations aren't there, blah, blah, blah. So a lot of time to sort of get it right, but also a lot of reasons to be excited about it. Yeah, I mean, there are already people who prefer being driven in gas-powered cars because of the regenerative braking, making them sick if they sit in the back. And so you can imagine that those consumer preferences go deeper and somebody says, I like the way a Bentley drives. I want to only call Bentley's. And so I'm calling Bentley specifically and the OEM is saying I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to build my own app because that's going to be really difficult.

Starting point is 02:35:22 I'm not going to bring my own liquidity to the market, but Lyft can kind of provide that. That's kind of an interesting, interesting way things could play out. Yeah. What else? Maybe they'll, even if they're self-driving. Right? And maybe they'll tune it a little bit, right?

Starting point is 02:35:34 Exactly. Off the shelf thing and they'll say this is the Bentley version of it that's a little more cautious or the Lambeau version, which is more, you know, aggressive. More thrilling, yeah. And then even the features within the vehicle, like cars are starting to differentiate that around that more, like this one has a fish tank, or this one has a karaoke machine, or this one has TVs, or the set up that you mentioned like there could be a lot more differentiation we're

Starting point is 02:35:56 certainly where we are consolidating down to like the iPhone of cars in some ways but you could see like a sort of Cambrian explosion as well totally what else is on your mind you were at you've you've seen multiple eras tech internet mobile you started back at Microsoft and was in 91 yeah a million years ago a lot is changing now we were just having a conversation with with someone in the AI companionship space kind of, and there's a lot of debate surrounding that right now. Is it dystopian? Is it actually good for people? But what's your take broadly on activity in AI right now and maybe even that last conversation? I mean, I actually think a lot

Starting point is 02:36:40 about exactly that last conversation. Look, Lyft's vision and our purpose is to serve and connect. The serve part is probably pretty obvious. I want to serve riders and drivers better than they've ever been served before. But the connect part, why? because I am a very deep believer, and it's not just some personal passion. It's like, you know, this is the world we live in, that digital technology, as cool as it is, it's also potentially super isolating,

Starting point is 02:37:05 super dividing, just in the sense that you can sort of find just the same people over and over again, the same loops to kind of get involved in, rabbit holes to go down, all these things. Meanwhile, the physical world is amazing, we're here in San Francisco, outside lands just this last weekend, it's hundreds of thousands of people,

Starting point is 02:37:22 listening to live music. You can listen to live music on Spotify. I mean, you don't need to, but you go there. It's a shared experience. And then just all the little, you know, interactions you have with people every single day. So thus, I look at AI and I think to myself, gosh, I love how cool it is to riff with it or feed it a bunch of data and have it show me things that I didn't see myself or, you know, spit at it, some, you know, our lift earnings and out to critique, you know, all these sorts of things. That's super amazing. Or like 30% of our code, It's not written by a we're deprecating a lot of code that just is cruffed because AI is finding like nobody's using it So all the customer service literally millions of people are now interacting with with our chat pots and it's better quality experience

Starting point is 02:38:04 So all that's cool, but but man my daughter just told me about a subreddit the other day It's got thousands of people the tens of thousands but I've called my boyfriend is an AI Literally the one I was looking at was a woman who just proposed to her a I assuming the AI I saw that right she was so excited about it. She's just like, yeah, I can finally call him my fiance. She said, I, you know, I asked him, what ring does he think that would look good on me? So he gave me some ideas. I went and bought that ring and I put it on myself. I pretended to be sort of surprised when I did about it. I feel so good about myself. And I think myself, gosh, I love how excited she is. And I can see a lot of scenarios where that doesn't necessarily end up the way you wanted to. And it's, here's the deal of the business bottle of companies like that, not to malign them, but it's engagement. They will want to engage, they will want to flatter, they will want to be the best friend you retain. There you go. It's the same issue. I mean, same issue with dating apps. The critique of dating apps is like

Starting point is 02:39:01 there's no real incentive for somebody to find a long-term partner because they're going to churn and the AI companion apps. You can, I guess AI companions are making the case that eventually the AI companion would be like, hey, why don't you go out in the real world and find a partner? But that seems to be at odds. And I'll just be your friend some of this be friends that kind of thing but anybody from the real world some of this isn't isn't new i mean i think about uh mechanical companions for a lot of married men their mistress is a gt3 rs and and they and they they pour their heart and soul into that vehicle into rowing out the gears and ringing out the engine and the engine notes speak to them in the language of a companion and so you know that

Starting point is 02:39:52 That is their mechanical companion. Now we have digital companions. What is old is new? Well, okay, so you're 100% right. And the difference is, like, the car doesn't watch you to love it. It just, you just, you fall in love with it. You have to. You have to love it.

Starting point is 02:40:08 Right. But it doesn't watch you. And it's not incentive to have you spend more time with it. You know what I mean? So that's the sort of tricky part here is, it. So anyway, I don't want to sound dystopian. I think there's some amazing, amazing uses. But I think I'm not sure that our brains are super well prepared for,

Starting point is 02:40:22 what happens when, you know, our, our AIs become our friends and then break up with us or we break up with them or they forget who we are because it's upgraded. Or a model is deprecated, right? That's what happened with chat. Like, that's what about the career GT? They don't make them anymore. Yeah. They don't make career GTs anymore.

Starting point is 02:40:39 They deprecated it. And I can tell you're still grieving. Grieving, absolutely. Since 2005, I think it's, I think it's hard to, it's hard to be a couple hundred grand. Now it's over a mill. It's hard to make the argument that. somebody, like, you know, getting married to their AI or except, you know, is good. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:41:00 Like, how do you make, how do you steal man that, John? I mean, it's just like hitting the track on the weekend, you know, got to get away from the family for a little bit. I don't know how far you can stretch this analogy. I mean, it's just a lot about you in this podcast. It's really interesting. Yeah, you know. Anyway, it's been a great having you next time you're in L.A.

Starting point is 02:41:21 Let's throw some pink moustaches on some Porsches. Go to the Porsche Experience Center. Next. And let's ride. Next earnings call. Join right after. We'll have pink moustaches on. And we'll hit the gong.

Starting point is 02:41:34 We'll hit the gong. I am here for it. I would love that. Back to back. In fact, I actually try to get my IR group, but they've not yet gotten excited about this idea to do our earnings call in the form of a podcast. Oh, there we go. I ever convinced to do that because I think it'd be interesting, right?

Starting point is 02:41:47 Yeah, yeah. Super interesting. Maybe we'll get you guys to host it. That would be fantastic. Fantastic. We'd love to. Amazing. Awesome. Great to hang. We'll talk to you soon. You guys, that was a lot of fun.

Starting point is 02:41:57 Have a good one. Take care. Cheers. Bye. Before we bring in our next guest, we have a demand from Donald Boat. He wants me to read this. He says, I'm running on so much Celsius sparkling cola and surplus intravenous compute that the twin forces, the twin force ghosts of Adam 2's and Fidel Castro are screaming

Starting point is 02:42:18 in my ears like UCLA sorority. girls at the Rose Bowl, screaming, do not stop until you envelop the world system, and your package fleets smog the firmament like the Onsler, like the Onsler wire headed into Starcraft 3 as dreamed by an unemployed 29-year-old bachelor in Busan, South Korea. And throw that up on the screen, please. Make Coogan read it. Very fun. This man has has a way with words. He's a great poster and he's on a generational run and we'll see where it goes. Thanks for writing in Donald Boat and good luck. He said that the final PC build would be ready Wednesday. I want to see it. Send us a photo as soon as it's put together. I want to know

Starting point is 02:43:07 the whole build. Throw it up on PC part picker. Put it all together for us so we can get a screenshot of what we're expecting. Then I want to see the Battlefield 6 stream. I want to see him getting some headshots some 360 no scopes he should just join live and game for a little bit he should i'd be down anyway we have our next guest from profound james how you doing get the gong ready give us the news what happened break it down for us hi john hi june hi good to see you big day big day what's going to happen i'm ready i'm ready what's going to break it down way too break it down for us that.

Starting point is 02:43:50 We're a dry, dry humor kind of guy. Yeah, we, we, uh, we just, um, we, we just closed, a $35 million dollar series.

Starting point is 02:43:59 What? Let's go. Let's go. Huge. Who's in the deal? Is it a tier one? Is it a really good firm? Who did the deal?

Starting point is 02:44:11 It's, uh, Sequoia capital. Yeah. I've heard of them. I've heard of them. He heard of them. That's fantastic news. Great group of people.

Starting point is 02:44:19 Okay, so we're taking that money, we're going to Washington, D.C., and we're lobbying to ban ads in LLMs because then everyone will have to buy your services. Is that a good idea? Break it down for me. I mean, honestly, I'd quite like ads to come into these services. I think it would be net good for us, I think, which create the click wear response of really understanding that AI is a marketing channel, but we could go to Washington and hang out with Keith. Okay, so, so AI, because like the joke that I'm getting at,

Starting point is 02:44:48 is basically like profound helps companies show up in generative AI results. Right now, the game, if I have a product, is I want to rank highly in chat GPT when someone asks, give me the survey of the landscape, go do the deep research report on, what was it, Aiden saying, like the best paper towels. And I want to rank highly for the best paper towels.

Starting point is 02:45:10 And so I come to profound, and profound helps me rank highly in that result. But if there's a bunch of ads, then, you would think like the relative value of like SEO generally decreases, but it seems like we're early enough in this that you could maybe see that as additive to your business. Is that how you're thinking about it? I think it's good. It's a good take. I think blue link search has been a two-party system. It's like a handshake between the can, you know, the blue link connects the consumer to the brand. Yeah. But these AI systems like chat GPT,

Starting point is 02:45:48 hijack that relationship. So the consumer really ends up having a relationship only with chat GPT. If I'm researching corporate credit cards, I don't really need to go to chase.com or ramp.com. I can just interface with chat GPT and it will go and visit their websites on my behalf. So I think there's new reasons that this is actually quite different from that old paradigm of traditional search. And I think if you're a brand owner. Yeah. And before you're just Google corporate cards and and maybe JPM is near the top and ramp is near the top and you're navigating to those individual sites and then going back and forth and back and forth are opening new tabs and what you're saying is it's now just like a lot more conversational and the consumer

Starting point is 02:46:33 comparison table yeah exactly yeah you skip you skip a step you have the answer the answer is what you'd have to you know there's a step in between previously so I think and we're also entering this this era where you know I if you're a if you're a brand owner, AI becomes the customer. So if you're, if you're a marketer or a CMO, any company on the planet, it's understanding that you have one new VIP customer, which is super intelligence. And we're building a technology platform to help brand build marketing that's aimed at super intelligence instead of humans. When we talked the first time, it must have been a couple months ago, we were in the old studio. We were talking just about like writing your website in a way

Starting point is 02:47:16 that can be ingested by like the web scrapers and like robots dot txd and that type of stuff but if we play this out more uh is it a can i pat myself on the back for putting three hours a day of my words into the endless corpus of web text such that everything i say uh ranks highly like is is it a volume game would you recommend that brands that are using profound and want to rank higher do a ton of podcasts and just get a lot of content out there about their brands. Is that a reasonable strategy? The risk of sounding somewhat self-serving, it kind of pires pretty nicely with a feature set that we've launched today called workflows, which essentially think of it like

Starting point is 02:48:02 a genetic workflows that will monitor your AI visibility and then proactively and reactively and reactively create net new content based on changes that we're seeing in the landscape. So it really taking out that kind of the rote labor of having to sit, you know, I think the 2015 paradigm was marketers would go to a platform and click into the data viz and build an insight and create new content. And now you can just do all of that all within one platform at the click of a button. Yeah, this is like the old Airbnb SEO story where like at the bottom of the footer they had like every single city. And it was like vacation rentals in Omaha, vacation rentals in, in, you know, like, like Tampa and then and then that ranked. But it's all driven by just like what they're seeing from Google and they feed it back

Starting point is 02:48:51 into the landing pages. Now you can do that with what's with what you're actually seeing in LLM search results, basically. You guys already. Yeah, sorry, Judy. The point being as well that you can create the content within. Yeah, you can actually instantiate the content. And I'm sure that a lot of the SEO heavy.

Starting point is 02:49:09 companies that really focused on that like automated a lot of that just like do a database query and then turn it into a landing page with a good route and you know and all the URLs that that follow so that it gets scraped into Google now you can do that in the chaty PT context and the other LLM how quickly are legacy like older companies kind of reacting to this changing trend and consumer behavior I know you guys already work with some of the biggest companies in the world so clearly some of them are are being responsive to it but is it is that is that common or do you still meet with companies that just don't understand kind of uh what's happening it's been pretty prevalent yeah as you said

Starting point is 02:49:51 we work with fortune 10 i mean i can't do the lot we don't have logo rights but fortune 5 we're working with 145 brands right now fortune 1 fortune 5 fortune 1 oh is it invidia fortune 1 We won't press you. No comment. The CEO of Reddit, you know, mentioned profound in their Q2 earnings report last week. That was very cool. Yeah, so I think it really is becoming a ballroom level concern for most big companies. Yeah, we work with, I think, 250 to 300 enterprise brands right now.

Starting point is 02:50:29 And most of the big agencies are relying on our platform to win here. Do you think there's some sort of alpha? I feel like there's a lot of conversations about brands and a lot of customer love that happens within the context of basically like support tickets or like one-on-one conversations. Is there potential alpha in having a flow where if a customer writes in and they're satisfied,

Starting point is 02:50:55 you're pushing them to publish that to the web in some way? So you're just getting more web text out there, something like that. Even if it's not on your own platform, it's like, hey, like we're actually going to be doing a lot more customer service on our Reddit and so like we want it yeah yeah you can email us and we'll do a one-on-one if it's like private information like you're billing but if you just want to talk about how to use the product and best practices like let's take this conversation over to Reddit

Starting point is 02:51:20 like that seems like maybe a strategy that people would want to adopt that's exactly what you would use workflows for this feature set that we've launched today so it would automate those workflows for you um yeah and what you're that exact point that you're mentioning if you think I don't think I can name them, but if you think of, you know, some of your favorite software companies, five years ago or three years ago, candidly, if you are an engineer and you are trying to troubleshoot a problem with that software, you would have gone to their docks. com or developer.com or developer.com and gone through their developer docs, but now you just use Anthropic or ChatGPT to troubleshoot.

Starting point is 02:51:57 So, yeah, I guess it kind of, I can bring that full circle back to the kind of SEO question. And there's so much more surface area here. There's, yeah, people aren't just using it for discovery. They're using it for post sales. It's, yeah, crisis management, PR teams. Last question from Jordan. Where does tradition, where do you see, is traditional SEO going to near zero for a lot of these companies? I mean, if you look at, you know, already the changes that Google's rolled out with AI overviews,

Starting point is 02:52:30 I saw Bill Gurley shared a number of quotes from earnings calls over the last month where people were just basically saying, look, like, our organic search traffic is down 60% year over year. And it was like a lot of different examples of that. So I'm curious where you think that goes. I think, you know, that search engines will be, they will seem very odd to our children as a concept. you know, thumbing through lists of blue links, it will seem something like the yellow pages. I think the act of SEO, those folks, the teams of people that have built their careers in that space, because it's a $90 billion a year industry, it's a huge industry, and the folks that work on that will likely be extremely well positioned

Starting point is 02:53:17 to dominate this new world of AI visibility or GEO or AEO or, you know, whatever we want to call it, answer, or sometimes we'd say agent experience is like another way to think about it. I think if you're a brand, the ones that care the most are brands that are high, or products that are high consideration purchases. So something that people do a ton of research on, like cars or consumer electronics with a tech forward end consumer. A question from the chat and then we'll let you go. Does profound offer a play for content publishers who were monetizing SEO referral traffic after it dropped off a cliff over the past few. years? How do you think about the evolution of content publishers that were monetizing SEO referral traffic and where all that goes? Is that like the wire cutter? Is that an example of

Starting point is 02:54:11 the wire cutter? That's a much trickier one to navigate. That's not really they're not really our customer. It's purely content, right? You work with I sell a physical thing. AI can't give you this thing and I'm just helping you get this thing faster. Yeah. If the content is the product it's going to get scraped it's very tricky so you've got to work out a deal with the if you're a content publisher you've got to go to the LLMs and say hey

Starting point is 02:54:36 let's do a deal one-on-one right yeah I mean I think you know there's been the whole Cloudflare thing where Cloudflare default turned on bots off which I think is audacious if you're a marketer you want bots putting your products in

Starting point is 02:54:52 but if you're a publisher yeah like you probably do want bots turned off and they've got I think that's going to be more similar to like the music industry or something thing where it's going to have to sort of like figure out itself as we saw there. Yeah, yeah, Cloudflare, like the really crazy scenario could be like, they look like a YouTube or they look like a Spotify where, yeah, most people put up a web, a blog post and they get a couple cents.

Starting point is 02:55:13 There's a couple people that put a banger blog post and they get a check for $20,000 just from the web traffic and we kind of get back to, oh yeah, like it's weird that I only got a couple hits to the website, but it was repurposed all over the place and it really updated the weights and it was super valuable to the to gpt six trainings run and so i just get a dividend from that for a long time that would be a really cool outcome but uh we'll have to keep monitoring the situation so thank you for joining us to you and the team congratulations and it's going to be a big rest of your day we'll talk to you soon thanks amazing play male loneliness is being called chaps i agree i agree uh we got devon from squint coming in the studio play some sound board hit me with

Starting point is 02:55:56 the news one there we go right i I think I'll need this again. I want to hit it this time. You want to hit it? I feel like I've gotten three. Give us the news. Give us the updates. What's going on in your world?

Starting point is 02:56:06 Welcome to the stream. Welcome to TVPN. How you doing? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate you making time for this. Of course. I think the news is that Squint is announcing a $40 billion series B.

Starting point is 02:56:18 Let's go! Congratulations. There we go. Almost took the gong off the rope there, John, but worthy. Are there any Tier 1s invested? Any tree-themed venture capital firms participating? We might have one. Okay.

Starting point is 02:56:41 The main tree one. That's great to hear. Yeah, yeah. Well, we can move on. It's been a few rounds of them. Fantastic. We can move on from the funding news. Give us the update on the company.

Starting point is 02:56:52 Break it down. How are you pitching the company these days? And then we'll go into some questions and deep dives. Sure. So, you know, Squint is a manufacturing intelligence platform. We use AI to drive efficiency on the factory floor. And we work with the biggest companies that make products that you use every day. So Fortune 500 companies like Pepsi and Michelin that make, you know, tortillas to tires. And I can share, maybe let me share a little bit about the problem statement before I talk about the product because it'll make more sense. I think, you know, manufacturing as an industry is booming, but it's like a big house that is built on toothpicks, right? And that foundation is really weak. So today, a lot of the like shop floor know-how lies in two places. It's either in the heads of experts that are about to retire or it's in a crusty binder somewhere that is hard to find and hard to understand. And I think today, if you're going to be investing and scaling the industry on the whole, you really really need to be able to solve that inefficiency. And so what Squint does is it uses a video of an operator doing any sort of work on the floor.

Starting point is 02:58:04 And then the AI watches that and writes a perfect standard operating procedure in seconds. And then using computer vision and augmented reality, it actually walks any operator through any task and is able to support them by answering questions, but also through the camera on the tablet, it can see if the work was done correctly. So we help basically elevate the quality of work.

Starting point is 02:58:27 So basically, so basically a completely separate like purely human track versus like the Siemens equipment, the CNC's, the automated pick in place. Like that's happening in a different world. You're more focused on, you know, humans in the loop type work. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think like a lot of the investment, even in robotics, it happens in the same customers that we work with. But that investment is going into things like, eliminating some of the ergonomically unsafe tasks or the highly repetitive tasks and then where the humans are involved what we're able to do is basically double their efficiency so we had a fortune

Starting point is 02:59:04 500 customer a CPG company that measured you know the before and after would squint and they saw that actually it reduced the time it took to do work by 50 percent right and so that's the kind of results you're getting with just like the same number of operators as before but you're able to double your, you know, throughput. How good is squint at, like, is squint one-shotting, you know, problems that, that workers are coming across? I mean, I think people have been pretty wildly impressed with Chat Chb-T's ability to, like, take a picture in their home of a bunch of wiring and just say, like, this isn't working, what's wrong? And it's just like starts to genuinely show real intelligence

Starting point is 02:59:45 in terms of fixing a situation. Are you guys already seeing that? on the factory floor, what does that look like? Yeah, you know, I think, I mean, that's a great example. I think in the consumer use case, if chat GPT was 95% accurate, we would be so happy as consumers, right? It would be like 95% of my problems are solved with this app. But in a factory, 95% accuracy means 5% of, like, devastating results. Yeah, you break like a half a million dollar machine.

Starting point is 03:00:17 Exactly. Or, you know, worse, someone gets hurt. And so for us, like, what we've oriented on is our AI will only answer things based on what it has seen in your factory floor. So all of this is a custom manufacturing process that it's learning. Got it. And then, yeah, like, it is one-shotting things. So, you know, most of the time, if you ask when to question, the problem is solved. And so our customers are starting to share stories like, hey, actually a couple weeks ago, I had a call.

Starting point is 03:00:45 And this customer said that I thought our ticketing system was broken. Because since we deployed Squint, we had zero tickets filed. But then we ran a whole IT investigation. And it turns out the ticketing system wasn't broken. They were just like the operators didn't have any more issues. So that's the kind of thing that we're kind of create now. That's awesome. Are you guys focused on the U.S. today already international?

Starting point is 03:01:09 Like what's the go-to-market look like? Yeah, it's a good question. You know, we're working with these massive global brands. So Pepsi, Michelin, Continental. All of those three, for example, we're working. with their plants in the U.S. and also abroad. Just a few weeks ago, I was in Germany for a week, ended up visiting, you know, 12 cities in five days or something, and it was crazy.

Starting point is 03:01:30 So we're starting to field that demand, and that's a big part of why we raised this round, too. Awesome. Congratulations. Thanks so much for stopping by. We're running a little bit of late today, so we're going to let you get back to your busy day. Go raise the series C. Come back on later this year. Yeah, later this week.

Starting point is 03:01:46 Later this week, potentially. Yeah, yeah. No problem. Preempt. Sounds good. Yeah, thanks a good time. Thanks for me. We'll talk to you, seven.

Starting point is 03:01:53 Have a good one. And up next, we have Alex Denko. We got a trade deal. Trade. The news broke today. He's going from Shopify to A16Z. And Drison Horowitz. Eric Torrenberg's latest pickup.

Starting point is 03:02:08 There is. Alex, welcome the show. Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Thank you for having me on. Break it down for us. Academy of the deal. What they do, did they sit to, did Mark and Dresen sit down with your mom?

Starting point is 03:02:20 Did Mark Andresen said, said, tell your parents, tell them you got a bright future. We would like to take your son to the big weeks. I did have to have a phone call with Mark Andreessen right next to my mom. Because I was on vacation that week. We were seeing my parents.

Starting point is 03:02:33 Fantastic. And the call with Mark was actually a stressful one because I had to give him my final negotiation demand, which was he had to unblock me on Twitter. No way. But he did. That's amazing. He did. What did you do?

Starting point is 03:02:49 What did you do to get blocker? Never give up if you've been blocked by, what did you do to get blocked by the go? So we don't know. We've decided not to look into it. Okay. Some things are best left as mystery in life. Yeah, yeah. We reserve the right to find out later. I've been blocked by people, had to apologize. I don't know exactly know why I got blocked.

Starting point is 03:03:06 But you know, you always lived to fight another day. It could have been an accident. Yeah, it could have been an accident. So what's at the top of the to-do list today, this week, this month? What are you going to be doing for injuries and Horowitz? So, I'm coming on board, Eric brought me into this amazing group of people he is putting together. Not to be understated and also not complete. There's more, Eric has more work to do yet.

Starting point is 03:03:30 I'm coming on to help them. Yeah, jobs not finished. I'm coming on to help make all of the written content coming out of Andresen be truly world-class and as good as it can be. I think a lot of people on the internet know me from my writing online. I've been a blogger for a long time despite having done other things, like be a founder. I've worked in D.C. before. I've been at Shopify for five years. But most people, I think, know me just from, you know, writing and mouthing off on the internet and generally doing the craft that has been internet blogging, right?

Starting point is 03:04:00 Which is just a really amazing and valuable part of tech that has been around for such a long time. You know, a really formative conversation in my career was, you know, once upon a time when I was a founder, my co-founder and I were trying to figure out how to launch a product. We didn't know what was involved in that or what that. that meant. And we went to a more experienced founder, our friend Amanda, and said, hey, what do we do? How do we launch this product? And she said, oh, well, I think you should email your email list and say, hey, we're going to go and do this. Tell us what you like. Tell us where we should reach you. Tell us, get lots of feedback on all these things. And then

Starting point is 03:04:31 they'll help you out. And I said, wait, wait, wait, stop. What do you mean email your email list? What's an email list? She's like, oh, you don't have thousands of fans that adore you and wait for your every email every week. And I was like, I need to be someone with one of those. so ever since then yeah um writing and newsletters and just the craft of having something to say has been a really important part of how i've always you know thought about how to be a great live player on the internet how do you think about breaking through with text because the link ban on x is tough uh not if you just post the whole yeah yeah is like should you just lean into more of the formats i mean there's certain amounts of like you can just be built different like

Starting point is 03:05:12 Chris Pike, who just drops a link to a Google Doc, and it always works somehow. People do screenshot essays, like, what's interesting? Something that stands out to me and why I'm excited for you to take this new role is I was having this thought yesterday. I was reading some particularly, like, sloppy AI generated text. And I was just, I was like, yes, the models are going to get better. But like, in a few years, like, at what point is, like, all the texts that you're reading online and throughout your day just generated?

Starting point is 03:05:42 and there's no soul and craft put into it. And it's like, you can still, you can remove hyphens and delve and it's not this. It's, you're not this. You're that, like, language. And you can still identify writing today. And I, and I just think, like, craft, like the craft of writing and thinking clearly and coming up with, trying to come up with new ideas is super important. It's Lindy.

Starting point is 03:06:11 Very Lindy. Yeah, so I like to think of it is that writing is power transfer technology, right, when you do it. It takes a lot of work to write something down, and it takes work to read something, right? It takes more work to read something than to listen to it. But the important thing that happens is that as you put in the work to write and as you put into work to read, what happens, this actually reshapes your brain a little bit. It reshapes your understanding of what you're talking about such a way that the person writing can actually transfer some legitimacy to the person reading, right? They can actually speak to this thing.

Starting point is 03:06:41 They have words for something that they knew, but, like, didn't quite know how to say before. And that gives them power, right? And it doesn't work the same way when you're talking, right? There is this fabulous complimentary kind of media called podcasts, which is listen for three hours and hear about all these great things. But to me, podcasts are an invitation to go find out something more. But if you actually want to do that power transfer, right, from the writer to the reader and give them something that gives them that power, like, you've got to write it down. Right. And if you think about this for the job of a VC firm, right, it's like, what is the job of VC? The job of VC is literally you are the legitimacy bank, right? Your job is to make founders powerful.

Starting point is 03:07:21 Right. And having an amazing free tier of that by saying, we think a lot about these things. We want to give you words to express what you're trying to say so that a client, a hire, an investor will take you a little more seriously is really important to do. So that's a big part of why we want to emphasize the goal is to give founders. this is the job of the whole firm and writing is just pretty good part of that when I think about writing at a 16 Z I think of a few buckets there's a ton because the firm's written a lot for a long time I think about maybe it was like a decade ago but I don't I don't know how often it still happens but the the general partner who does the deal writes basically a deal memo and says this is why we're investing in this company and that's and that's very interesting. There's also the Mark Andresen op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Software is eating the

Starting point is 03:08:13 world. It's time to build. These like big like just like, you know, bombs on the timeline that drop and stick around for a long time. Then there's the market map, which is, it's been maligned, but I think it's deeply underrated. It's a time honor tradition. And I think these are in a unique position to actually put out great content there. And I've actually really enjoyed digging into those as we've been doing the show. And then there's also like the wildcard ones. Like I remember in Driesen used to do these interviews with founders in the portfolio, just basically like it's like what's your everyday carry but in the digital world? So it's like what apps are you running? What tools are you using? Those are really cool. So there's a ton of stuff and I

Starting point is 03:08:56 probably mentioned I missed like half of it but maybe even more. But what's exciting to you? What's interesting? What kind of formats are you do you see as like fertile ground to go explore if you've had the time to think about it so far. Yeah. So I'll tell you what I think is a really interesting meta that I'm going to spend a lot of time going after is speech writing. Okay. Interesting. Speech writing is an interesting and kind of thrown by the wayside craft because now when you think about long form, it's like when you are interesting and you have something to say,

Starting point is 03:09:25 you can go on a podcast, you can talk for a long time, or you are going to tweet about it, right? But there is something that is missing of the craft of like putting in an extraordinary amount of tortured effort into creating, you know, like a 5,000 word delivery of what is it that you have to say this year? Right? And if you're a GP, right, it's like, hey, you know, you get time and perspective to figure out like this year, what is the core thing that you want to say, right? That is going to help inform all the other content, frankly.

Starting point is 03:09:53 Like people like Catherine at A16s year are also already incredible at this. Yeah. And bringing that sort of to more throughout the culture is going to be important. Either way, though, so you mentioned all these different types of content. Speech is incredibly underrated. We utilize them internally with the team. And they're not every week. They're not on a schedule, but sometimes you need a speech.

Starting point is 03:10:18 You need to just nail it and they can really set the tone and the energy within the company. And I'm doing chills, thinking about Mark Andreessen standing on stage in front of thousands of people saying, We chose to raise this growth fund, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. That gives us hard. To test the ability of our LPs. To test the capital markets. To measure them. Why do we go to the moon?

Starting point is 03:10:45 To test the health of the global capital markets. There will never be enough venture capital. I mean, yeah, like a well-defined phrase. Andy Dresen has been fantastic. Cointages. And I feel like, yeah, the speeches, that's an interesting answer. I was not expecting that. but that makes a ton of sense.

Starting point is 03:11:02 Well, it's good to buy low on things. I think buying low on speeches is your daily tip. That's great. That's great. Where else should we go with this? I think speeches could be an entirely new launch video meta, right? Everybody, like the bar burners.

Starting point is 03:11:19 Everybody has a launch video. There's like three new launch videos every day. A lot of them like blur together because they're cool graphics and this person invested and here's this product UI. And if you just have this, the CEO just like rant at the camera and you can get people to like truly listen to that, it probably ends up being, you know, pretty, pretty powerful. Those kinds of things can go viral and really powerful rays, right?

Starting point is 03:11:43 Because it tells people that you have something to say, right? And it's doubly important because you talked about all these different forms of writing that are all great in their own way. And the one thing that they all have in common is I'll tell you what all bloggers know, right, about writing is you have two audiences, right? The first audience is the people who actually read what you, you said, which is small. The second audience is the people that they tell that thing, right?

Starting point is 03:12:07 Because they get something out of retelling it, right? Like they get that legitimacy. They get that ability to express themselves or whatever. And there is a trade between the writer and the inner circle of people who are going to actually listen to that speech or actually read that thing all the way through. And something that was great about the old VC blogging meta, way back in the day. So 10, 12, 15 years ago when, you know, like AVC was cooking and Semmel Shaw and Mark Schuster and people like that is the way a blog worked, like the microstructure of blogging

Starting point is 03:12:35 was you had a blog and you had readers and a comment section. And everybody came to your blog and the readership would be there. And the way that you would tell what blogs were good was you would have lots of comments. Right. And that's where your primary readership would then go and invisibly tell other people about it. Then the feed emerged, right? We got Twitter. We got hacker news. We got places where suddenly the discussion moved in public. And what happened then is that first of all the ability to reach a secondary audience exploded so the like the returns to writing were only got bigger but it became less obvious to do right the trade became a little bit obscured by virtue of the fact that it's all in public right and it's all based on how many

Starting point is 03:13:12 retweets and likes you get and i think what's happening now as we go even further past this is that the returns to writing and reading have never been more valuable but never been less obvious so you know it's time to go if you if you go bring the output of a firm as legendary as A16Z with all the amazing things they have to say and the statements of record that they want to put out into the world you know my job is to go help Eric and the whole GP crew and Ben and Mark bring this back and make it amazing again making it really like a brand that's going to shine I can't wait for your first software is eating the world moment also yeah I mean I feel like the

Starting point is 03:13:48 speech thing really ties into the new A16 Z brand like when I see the coin I feel like that's like the art deco coin with the adicus yeah I feel like speech are kind of Art Deco in some ways. I don't know why I'm making that association, but it feels somewhat linked. Is it Arndaer or is it a Beauxar, right? Like, do you remember the line it's like, Art Deco is made by dwarves,

Starting point is 03:14:09 bozars made by elves? Yeah, but it's very, it's very, uh, what is it? It was, like, the style, it was Randian, and I feel like in, in Anne Rand's writing, there's a lot of speeches that happen throughout the book. There sure are famously. Makes sense. Yeah, famously.

Starting point is 03:14:24 Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations on. trade deal congratulations on the move and yeah excited to see your work seeing your work and hearing it thank you for having me on guys come on and give a speech soon yeah absolutely speech speech speech speech speech speech speech let's thank you all everybody cheers and we have Isaiah Taylor coming into the studio we'll bring him on the screen he has big news from Washington DC in the nuclear world let's bring him

Starting point is 03:14:57 the studio. We are in the fourth hour. If you're still with us. We're in the fourth hour. Oh, looking good. I love the background. What's going on? Lighting. You're looking great. How are you doing? Not today. I'm John and Jordan. I'm good view here in the aid of the technical technology. We are going to need you to switch your microphone, though, because we cannot hear you very clearly. I don't know what's going on. Maybe try talking more and seeing if it works out. How about that? Is that any better? No, it's really muffled. I think it's the Apple.

Starting point is 03:15:26 Can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, can you, Can you switch the, it might be the headphones that you're picking up the microphone there. I don't know, but it's coming through pretty scratchy. I think it's going to be rough if we try and stick with this. How about that? That's better. Boom. There we go.

Starting point is 03:15:42 All right. We're going to do it live. We're going to go off of the laptop here. All right. Fantastic to talk to you, John and Jordy. And I want to introduce you to Ward Zero, which is the beautiful machine behind me here. This is our first prototype nuclear reactor here in our last. Angeles facilities. So it's extremely exciting to be with you today. Wow. And that's

Starting point is 03:16:02 that yeah, you're not on a green screen. That's actually like a window. This is real. Wow. There are there are people walking around. Yeah. I noticed that. My, my office is saying we get a lot of glass with the way the glass is kind of reflecting slightly. It's cool. I thought it was an image. It looks like a poster, but yeah. We get a lot of fake backgrounds, but this one's real. Anyway, give us the update. It may start running at some point. We'll have to see. Can you drive a forklift yet or do you not have time? to get paid. I actually am Forklift certified. I don't know if I have the certification sitting on my desk. I just moved desks. Congratulations. Give us the update. What happened in Washington, D.C.

Starting point is 03:16:38 Why are you in the news? Yeah, so this was a very exciting day. A couple months ago, I was on to announce the signing of four executive orders. The president essentially said, listen, we need nuclear back in the United States. This is a strategic priority. And today, the Department of Energy announced the initial companies that will be part of the pilot program to turn on three nuclear reactors on America's 4th, 2026, America's 250th birthday. So we have 2026. We've got a year. We've got a year. We're talking about less than 12 months. And we actually have a counter upstairs and a very, very large screen in our office that counts down to the second our deadline to go and hit that next year. We have a site in Utah, and we're working very quickly toward that goal.

Starting point is 03:17:26 Yeah, it seems like reading the press release, it was like all the boys. I knew like seven of the companies. I mean, I know they were competitors, and it's obviously fierce competition. But nuclear is famously, like, it's such a green field because there's really like no serious companies, and you kind of saw that in the release. It wasn't a lot of like legacy companies. It was like basically all startups people that we know. And yeah.

Starting point is 03:17:48 So very exciting. I mean, obviously, like, the race is on. It feels like it'll be mostly friendly competition. This is less of a winner take-all market. And it's such a good, like, it's like everyone's in it for America. They're not purely in it just to like, you know, accumulate like all the power in the world, take over the whole world or whatever. But yeah, what was your reaction to the rest of the crew? I mean, absolutely.

Starting point is 03:18:11 There's a ton of exciting people in here who are working very hard. A lot of these companies have been working for a long time and I've been waiting for this big break. Right. And the big break is an administration that steps forward and says, all right, guys, let's see if you have this stuff, right? You've been saying for a long time that the regulatory environment is the problem that's bottleneck. We're going to clear everything out and let's see if you got the goods. And so that's the test of the next 10 months here. So we're really excited about it.

Starting point is 03:18:34 You know, I think there are a couple of things that are driving this moment. AI is clearly a huge one. I was at the executive order signing a couple of weeks ago for AI. And the president made it very clear that this is a massive priority for the administration. We're going to beat China on AI. We're going to win this thing and we're going to do it in the next three years. And obviously, energy is hugely important to that. A subtle note on this on energy that most people don't understand is that nuclear particularly is important for AI.

Starting point is 03:19:02 You can get cheap energy through renewables and sort of an intermittent period. And I think that worked pretty well back when we were doing a lot of pre-training. So you can pre-trained during the day when the energy is really cheap and you can kind of follow that curve around. As we move toward inference, it's really important to have a lot of steady load. We need these turbines to be spinning all the time, and especially as these inference loads are moving more agentic, right? You're going to have these enterprise agent loads, and hopefully those are working while we're sleeping. The stability that becomes even more important. So nuclear is a massive thing to kind of step into the breach here and solve that problem very quickly.

Starting point is 03:19:36 Walk me through the next 10 months. Yeah, talk about the, talk about having a timeline. Yeah, what do you actually have to do? In some ways, historically long timelines have nuclear's certainly. probably up there with rocket science in terms of, you know, we know how to do it. It doesn't mean it's not hard. And so when you like really condense a timeline down like this. That Atlanta plant, the Georgia plant was like 20 years?

Starting point is 03:20:05 About 15. Yeah, it took about 15 years. So I'd be like, it's interesting you mentioned rockets because I think this is a really good parallel. We think of rockets as taking a long time to build. But obviously, SpaceX kind of proved the opposite. SpaceX proved that you could build a rocket very quickly. You could launch it quickly. You could iterate.

Starting point is 03:20:21 And actually what they did is they went back to go forward. Because when we were first doing rockets in the Apollo program, we went from scratch with the Mercury program to humans landing on the moon 10 years later. And so that was an extremely, extremely rapid development process. Guess what? They blew up a lot of rockets, right? They launched a lot.

Starting point is 03:20:39 They blew up. And there's this joke that our rockets always blow up. But they got there and they did it through building quickly. And over time, that industry slowed down and it kind of got governed by these primes. And it was really difficult for us to get these big systems off the ground. And when Elon came back, he said, you know what, we're going to start with a really small rocket. We're going to start with the Falcon one. And we're going to launch it quickly.

Starting point is 03:20:59 And we're going to learn how to launch rockets. We're going to build up the talent. And the regulator is going to get used to doing that again. And so I think there's a huge parallel here with nuclear where nuclear is actually very similar. In the early days of nuclear energy, you actually saw a lot of that rapid iteration, like the early days of rocket. tree. The world's first nuclear reactor turned on in eight months, from a piece of paper to criticality in the first system was eight months. The next reactor turned on another six months after that. And the third one turned on another six months after that at Oak Ridge,

Starting point is 03:21:28 where my great-grandfather was a physicist. So we're actually kind of doing a similar thing that we did in space where you go forward, you know, go back to go forward. And I also like to point out when the first reactors were being made, this was in the era of, you know, manually drafting and slide rules. Right. And so it was extremely practical. is extremely focused on the outcome. You have to actually bend the metal. You have to stack the blocks, and these atoms have got to get split. So, you know, there's a cultural shift back to this R&D-focused place where we can actually

Starting point is 03:21:58 iterate and get through it. What are, when you iterate quickly on a rocket and you launch it and it doesn't work, it blows up humans. You know, it can set things back in a way, but you learn something. What are the kind of like risk factors? when, you know, moving super quickly with a project like this that you guys and other players in the industry are keeping in mind? Yeah, you know, rockets are a lot more exciting than the nuclear reactors. When a rocket goes wrong and it's a really big, you know, explosion. Fireworks.

Starting point is 03:22:31 Yeah, there's fireworks of these pretty colors. You know, reactors are really boring. The nominal case is that this reactor sits here and does nothing. The nominal, the actually sub-nominal case is also that the reactor sits here and does nothing. So there's a lot that you can do in the physics and the design of these reactors to ensure that they're safe. So really what we're doing when we do this testing is we're verifying our assumptions on the mechanical components, right? Do our pumps work how we expected them to? Do the valves work?

Starting point is 03:22:58 Are we leaking things, right? There's these sort of all of the nitty gritty of actually getting a physical system to perform how you expected to. So I don't expect to see out of this experiment that there will be, you know, large failures, you know, hopefully not. That does have to do with the architecture, though. one of the reasons that we've picked this architecture standing behind us is that it is an extremely fundamentally safe architecture and that allows us to move quickly. That's great. That's great. It's great to hear. I would ring the gong, but I feel like we should save it for when the reactor goes critical, right? Yes. Come back on. Let's save it. You got the countdown. Jobs not finished.

Starting point is 03:23:33 How about this? How about this, John and Jordy? If Valor is the first, why don't you come and ring the gong on the site at the first criticality? How about that? You need a hazmat suit. You also need, you will need a hazmat suit. Well, I mean, we talked to the founder of replica and she said that she grew up in Chernobyl who was like playing with radiated toys. And so she turned out fine. She built a big company.

Starting point is 03:23:58 And so, you know, maybe radiation poisoning underrated. Underrated. No, no. You'll be safe? We're working out of the San Rafael Energy Research Center in Utah. There's a couple of buildings. Some of them are nuclear. Some of are not.

Starting point is 03:24:11 We're going to throw a party in the non-nuclear side. So we'll love to hang you there to bring the gun. We'll be there. Thank you so much. Well, thanks guys. Congratulations. Keep up all the great work. Good luck.

Starting point is 03:24:20 Cheers. We'll talk to you later. Bye. Well, what a show. What a show. Should we do any timeline? I have one story, but we should save it for the next one. Save it for tomorrow.

Starting point is 03:24:32 Daniel, growing Daniel, says they should make a TBPN for sports. I completely agree. I mean, it is crazy. We invented television. We invented streaming. And now all we need to do is a society is just take the innovation that we've created here and bring it to other industries, other sectors. And, oh, we got-

Starting point is 03:24:54 Mitchell Baldridge says TBPN for Catholicism. I like that. I think they should make a TVPN for monitoring situations, which is live, the Situation Room. The Situation Room. That is hilarious that it's called the Situation Room. Yeah, Raul Sunwalker posted, oh my God, they created a TBPN for finance and it's CNBC with Andrew Sorkin and Sorkin actually. And he actually replied with the crying emoji, which is very funny.

Starting point is 03:25:27 It's good stuff. I appreciate. Anyways, without further ado, have a great rest of your afternoon. Thank you for tuning in today. We love you and we will see you tomorrow. Very excited for the show tomorrow. Yeah, we'll talk to you later. Once more, we'll have some range.

Starting point is 03:25:39 I have a good one. Cheers. See you. Bye. Bye.

TBPN Live - Timeline in Turmoil: Elon Clashes with Altman, Perplexity Offers $34.5B for Chrome, Apple in Elon's Crosshairs | David Risher, James Cadwallader, Devin Bhushan, Demi Guo, Eugenia Kuyda, Alex Danco, Isaiah Taylor

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